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.

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!

Forgiveness: Cluster Bombs and Cancer

Chemotherapy is not my only approach to healing from metastatic breast cancer. My doctor, a top research oncologist (her first name is Hope - always stick with an oncologist named Hope), says her drugs cannot cure what I have got, only treat it; yet I know that in the ultimate reality, nothing is incurable and all things are possible. Even Dr. Hope says that sometimes tumors just disappear and she doesn't know why. So I use many alternative approaches as a complement to the Western medicines I receive.

Practicing forgiveness is one technique that gives me physical and emotional comfort. Just last week I was meditating on forgiving Charles Krauthammer. Go look him up if you want to know why he needs forgiveness. I imagined him as a crippled man who believes that he is hated, and suffers from physical and emotional pain. I focused on his face in my mind, and sent love and compassion to him as if I were thinking with love of my own brother or cousin; in a moment my liver relaxed. The congestion and hardness in my abdomen eased. I have no idea if this meditation will help Charles Krauthammer, but it sure helped me.

I also work with a professor of holistic medicine who is expert in biofeedback, physiology, and visualization techniques. Cancer patients who visualize their own healing have better outcomes - there is good data to show this, and major cancer hospitals in the USA and Europe now offer visualizing and guided meditation classes to their patients. The classic example is: imagine your white blood cells are sharks devouring the helpless, weakened cancer cells. That sort of thing.

Last week a kind of poem or rant came to me as I was meditating:

Cluster bombs
innumerable tiny lesions upon the flesh of my Mother
waiting to explode, maim, destroy
inextricably seeded into the structure of the earth.
Hail falls and cluster bombs explode.
The soil is sprinkled with death.

The earth is my Mother
her body is mine
her streams my bloodstream.
My liver is seeded with innumerable tiny microlesions
cluster bombs of cancer
too many to clear
waiting to explode.

The million cluster bombs Israel dropped upon the soil of South Lebanon in August 2006 continue to detonate, killing Lebanese shepherds, farmers and children. I find it difficult to forgive this. I can let go of the horrors of July-August 2006. The destruction of the war is done, and Lebanese are rebuilding. But the continuing destruction of cluster bombs, the toxicity of so many dropped upon the earth, and the ecological disaster to the land of Lebanon, seem like an unforgivable wound.

The connection between the cluster bomb infestation of Lebanese land and the diffuse metastasis in my liver felt right to me - symbolically right; emotionally right. Exactly one year after my father's death from cancer in September 2006, I was diagnosed with this diffuse metastasis, and I have long believed that the personal loss and the larger anguish and rage of the '06 war contributed to the illness.

If I imagine that my liver is seeded with cluster bombs, that perhaps this honeycomb of lesions might have an emotional connection to my fear, despair and rage at the bombs riddling the land of Lebanon, then what do I do now? I talked with the visualization doctor about it.

You could imagine the UN peacekeeping forces clearing the sites, he said. They have ways of locating the bombs and raking them up.

I need to forgive, I said. I can do that visualization, but I really need to forgive the people who did it, and that is so very hard.

You can think about the good side of these persons, he said. Very few people in the world are totally nasty characters. There are some. But most people have some good in them, somewhere. The evil they commit is situational, part of a larger system that is evil. Think about the good in those people.

Well okay. I knew I could probably do that. I have met Israelis and count a few as friends. I got up from the consultation chair, went out the door where my dear cousin N was waiting for me, and went home.

When we pulled into our driveway and parked, a young man with an Israeli accent called to me. "Could you move the car, because we can't get into the other one." My husband had summoned an emergency locksmith while I was away to replace the ignition on our second car; he had chosen a company at random out of the phone book. I moved the car, got out, and saw this young, handsome guy with dark eyes, pale long face and long nose, brown hair pulled into a ponytail, carrying an electric drill. Next to him was a friend, this one with a smaller face and head and short nose, dark olive skin, cute. The friend looked like an Arab, but the guy with the drill looked like a central casting Jesus, an Orthodox icon of the sixth century, a hippie Jewish guy who might be an Oberlin College student.

"Listen to that lovely accent," I said to cousin N, loud enough so they could hear. "I think we have some cousins visiting us."

"Cousins, are you Jewish?" Long haired locksmith asked. I felt utterly light and happy.

"We are cousins and neighbors but we are not Jewish," I answered, merrily. He ducked into our car and started messing with the ignition. We talked about the ignition, and I teased his friend for wearing body armor. It was this black plastic vest with a long spine like vertebrae down the back, worn over his shirt and under his jacket; the frontispiece actually said "Body Armor."

"Oakland isn't THAT dangerous," I told him. The friend got very earnest and explained he wore it to ride his motorcycle, and that it was only bulletproof in the back.

"She's making a joke," locksmith said to his buddy, who looked at me with concern. These young men and their gear, I thought. Both guys wore earpiece cel phones.

I quit kibbitzing and went inside, but I felt such affection for these two fellows fixing my car. They were shebab, young energetic men running around Oakland practicing their trade. Usually we only refer to Arab young men as shebab, but these Israeli guys were clearly shebab. I told my husband and cousin N that I am just predisposed to like Middle Eastern shebab. They make me happy. I don't know why. I have no idea if they understood that despite my teasing I actually felt affection for them. I felt a similar rush of affection and pleasure last year upon meeting a group of California cousins from my village - they were so energetic and handsome and full of life that I said "you guys make me proud to be Lebanese." But the Israeli locksmiths are no tribesmen of mine, so my good feeling about them is not clan solidarity. I laughed at myself.

My husband said if I could admire shebab in the driveway, he could admire "shebabas", and I informed him that the correct term was sabayah. If he wants to admire sabayah from afar that's fine with me. We all had a big laugh about it.

That night I realized that the Great Mystery had sent me some Israelis to forgive, to like, to appreciate. No cluster bombs came between us. What a coincidence that they appeared an hour after my doctor suggested I think of the good side of the Israelis I resent. Whatever their histories, their tribal affiliation, I got to experience human goodwill for these two guys. None of our history mattered in the California sunshine. They were fixing my ignition, and I was appreciating them for being clever, alive young men. The good in them was absolutely apparent.

I can't stop the horrors in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq. I can't make my president see reason, nor can I change the minds of the many people in the world who suffer from hatred and bigotry. But to save my own life, to relieve the torment in my own liver, I can forgive, I can feel good will, exactly where I am, with whomever shows up.

May the peace I feel ripple out like the circles around a stone dropped into a pond, may it affect somebody else, somewhere.

PS last week when my nurse checked my abdomen, her eyes got wide. "Where is your liver? What have you been doing?" The liver is measurably smaller (by three centimeters) and much softer - just in two weeks' time. I told her I'd begun acupuncture; but I didn't mention all this new meditation and visualizing I've been up to. "Whatever you're doing, keep it up," she said.

Stuff White People Like

Warning, satire follows.

I have long had a problematic relationship with my whiteness. For most of my life I knew I was largely white, but also half-Arab, which is supposed to be white but isn't white enough for many white people. Many of my Arab relatives upon immigrating to America deal with their whiteness dilemma by taking on as many tastes and characteristics of white people as they can. I, however, felt like I could not accept the whiteness inherited from my mother's side and tried to ignore it, although occasionally I noticed a certain Protestant starchiness breaking through that could only be ... you know.

I grew up with a white (Southern) mother in a liberal college professor household. I thought I acquired all kinds of interests and tastes of my own that had nothing to do with my parents... but I have come to realize in my middle age that many of these interests are badges of a certain kind of white people. This blog explains it all for you: Stuff White People Like.

For instance, they linked to a New York Times article I also linked to, about (white) young people leaving big cities to take up farming. The blog entry notes Stuff White People Like referenced in the article:

1. New York Times
2. Non Profit Organizations
3. Organic Food
4. Arts Degrees
5. Brooklyn
6. Hating Corporations
7. Farmers Markets
   
   
8. Having Two Last Names
9. Irony
10. Study Abroad
11. Microbreweries

Now the only two items on there that don't apply to me are Having Two Last Names (but mine is hyphenated, which gives me authenticity points among many white people) and Microbreweries. I just don't care about microbreweries although of course I have patronized them. Everything else - sorry, fits me to a tee. Busted.

However if you look at the whole Stuff White People Like list, you find many things that I have either moved beyond and now reject (gifted children, multilingual children, hating your parents) or that I find irritating and moronic (outdoor performance clothes, Apple Products, pirated music & filled-up I-pods, Toyota Prius, and marijuana). Is this because I am not really a white person? Or because I am just fashion-forward as always, and can pick the soon-to-be-discarded items on the SWPL list?

Many years ago I had a fight with a then boyfriend, in New York, who wanted to move to Palo Alto. I wanted to move to SF or Oakland. At the height of the argument I screamed "I can't live in Palo Alto because it's too white!" My (very white) boyfriend was stunned. I was surprised at myself, too. Where did this come from? I called up my brother (who had grown up in North Carolina and was now living in Santa Cruz, another white town) and asked him: "Khalil, do you think you are white?"

"Well, at two o'clock in the morning when the North Carolina State Police stops me for a traffic check, I am as white as I can be. But the rest of the time, no, I don't really think I'm white." This was my first inkling of my confusion about my whiteness, and that it may have something to do with my half-Arab self.

However, the Stuff White People Like blog has an answer for this - they say white people like being the only white person around. Bingo! And for a certain kind of white person, being half-Arab while white is the ultimate trump card. Makes me authentic, exotic, interesting, multi-lingual, provides me opportunities to bring interesting food to parties about which I can blather if I desire (wild-crafted za'atar from Mieh-Mieh, anybody?), all the while still vibing like a genuine white person.

Oh God this line of satire is going to make me hate myself...

Well I hope the blog gives you a laugh. It gives me demographic claustrophobia, a term I coined back in New York when I was 19, to describe the feeling I get when standing in line to get into a film festival or cultural event only to discover that everybody else in line is exactly like me. Same demographics. Maybe different races and ethnicities but same arts degrees, good colleges, taste in clothes, choice of food, blah blah blah.

Hold John Yoo To Account For His Crime

I was at a party on Wednesday night for an author whose latest novel deals with torture during Guatemala's civil war. My friend the Human Rights Lawyer had been in the Yucatan since before John Yoo's torture memo of 2003 was released, and I was filling her in on the latest as we sat on a plush sofa and ate dolmas and hummus; we were in the north Berkeley hills in a prosperous neighborhood.

"He lives around here," I said. Our other friend who writes about Argentina's torturers and their victims, listened in on the conversation. "He is part of our community. What are we going to do about him? If we just keep on worrying about torture in Guatemala or Argentina, and we don't address the man who enables torture by our government, who lives among us, then aren't we being hypocrites?"

John Yoo shops where we shop, he drives the streets we drive, we heard a rumor that he lives in this very neighborhood, close to Human Rights Lawyer and Guatemala Novelist. And he wrote the memo enabling Abu-Ghraib and Guantanamo torture. But we do nothing. We don't know what to do, so we keep on chauffeuring our children to school, and attending nice parties. Are we turning into good Germans, just going along with creeping fascism because it would be impolite or out of bounds to make a stink?

Well, maybe yes.

I believe I saw Mr. Yoo yesterday in the waiting room of a doctor I consult in Berkeley. I'm not positive. I have trouble lining up photos of people with the real person. But what if I did meet him in my doctor's waiting room? He looks like a frightened, dewy, pleading boy-man. I don't know how to be cold or cruel to such a person. And I wouldn't compromise doctor-patient confidentiality by asking about him or discussing where exactly we were. (not a shrink's office BTW)

I want to see Yoo held to account. I don't want him - or anyone - to believe that because I accept his right to decent treatment as a human being in his daily round, that means I accept what he has done.

John Yoo, in writing the torture memo, has undermined everything that matters about this Republic of which I am a citizen. And I am not certain that any institution of this Republic is going to call him to account. (or prosecute "the deciders", either). We're all too polite, too concerned with following the rules.

John Yoo must account for his actions, in public. It's not enough for him to be shunned or harassed or insulted around town, around campus, as some have suggested. He undermined the principles upon which this country was founded, and he must pay a public price for this. The nature of his mistake must be explained in public, so that the many other Americans who don't understand why torture is bad for the country may learn something.

I don't believe in mobs with pitchforks or public insult as the only action. Such methods do not promote justice or respect for the rule of law. I do believe in due process.

At the very least, can Berkeley lawyers and other faculty hold a teach-in? Invite Yoo to attend and defend himself; give plenty of time to those lawyers who have analyzed exactly what's wrong with his memo, his actions, and US torture policy under Bush.

This Republic's citizens hunger for justice; our constitutional law students need moral direction. The fabric of our democracy is torn. Mend it!

Preston Vineyards and Pugs' Leap

Leila, Joseph & Jacob
Originally uploaded by Debbie MacLeod

Here I am with my children at an organic farm in Sonoma County, CA, at the end of Dry Creek road. We played hooky from school Friday to visit my brother-in-law's friends who have a goat ranch and artisan cheese operation; then picnicked at Preston Vineyards farm and winery.

Eric and baby goats, Pugs' Leap Farm and dairy.

What an idyllic day. The owners of these farms are trying to live sustainably, farm sustainably, and feed themselves from the product of their soil, integrating all into the natural environment of this fertile valley.

California's Central Coast Secrets in the New York Times

I think the New York Times is stalking me. They published a travel guide to Berkeley; they wrote about how all the cool young artists in Brooklyn are moving to my part of Oakland. Now they write about Cambria, CA. This town was one of our secret hideaway honeymoon spots ten years ago: Surf and Quiet Amid the Pines of the Central Coast. We drove down the coast from Berkeley to Santa Barbara, stopping in several places along the way. Cambria is quiet, unhip, and beautiful, with pretty good food. Why did the Times have to blab?

Just this week I was thinking of taking a trip to that stretch of coast. Wasn't exactly going to stay at Cambria, but I was thinking of another beach town nearby. I won't tell where. The Times will write it up and then we'll never get reservations.

My Sister, the Reluctant War Mom

I don't talk about this publicly out of respect for the privacy of others, but my sister-in-law has now written a moving piece in this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian about her son in the U.S. military:

The hardest thing I've ever done was take my son to the airport the day he deployed to Iraq.

Sarah Phelan is married to my brother Khalil, and her son and daughter have become members of my own family. When her son dropped out of college to join the Army National Guard, we worried with Sarah, and when he deployed to Iraq we wept. Sarah has been an anti-war activist for decades; she never accepted her son's choice to join the military. And she loves him profoundly.

Read her piece.

You can also follow Sarah's political reporting on San Francisco politics at the SF Guardian, both in the regular pages and on the Politics blog.