Nukewatch – Page 184

December 28, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Mining Industry Repealing Wisconsin Anti-Pollution Laws

By Kelly Lundeen

On November 8, Wisconsin lawmakers repealed the state’s “Prove-It-First” sulfide mining statute and sent it to Gov. Scott Walker for his signature. The law allowed for a mine to be licensed if its proponents could demonstrate that a similar mine had operated for 10 years and been closed for 10 years without causing acid mine drainage or polluting water. Since the requirement was never met, the statute has protected Wisconsin waters from sulfide mines since 1998. But beginning in 2013, Gov. Walker and Koch brothers-funded mining industry backers made repeal of the moratorium a top priority. Meanwhile, Republican Rep’s Jesse Kremer of Kewaskum, Rep. Cody Horlacher of Mukwonago, and Sen. Duey Stroebel of Saukville introduced bills to repeal state laws limiting air and water pollution not regulated under federal law.

A coalition of indigenous, environmental, and sports organizations mobilized to protect “Prove it first.” Over 20 years ago, many of the same groups had united around opposition to the metallic sulfide mining at Flambeau and Crandon, and saw the successful passage of the moratorium.

Back in the late ‘90s, both current Nukewatch staffers, John LaForge and I, were independently active in the anti-pollution struggle. For me, collecting postcards to support the Mining Moratorium and protesting the Crandon Mine was an early introduction to environmentalism as a geology student at University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire; and for John it meant organizing nonviolent action with Flambeau mine opponents from across the state.

Exxon’s Crandon mine proposal was stopped and the mine site sold to the Mole Lake Ojibway and the Forest County Potawatomi. The Flambeau Mine came and went, and the closed mine site has never been fully reclaimed after 20 years even though tailings were shipped off site. The Flambeau copper/gold operation was one of the major tools used by both sides of the moratorium repeal debate. Mining advocates claimed falsely that the site had been cleaned up, while opponents referred to the company’s own records to prove the site is polluting Stream 3, which feeds the Flambeau River. Flambeau mine site owners have never secured a mine reclamation “Certificate of Completion” due to the pollution—proven by 45 violations of water quality standards documented in a report by the Flambeau Mining Co. itself (a subsidiary of Rio Tinto). Unfortunately, industry-manufactured lies that “the Flambeau River remains fully protected” have dominated public discussion of the repeal.

At the state’s legislative hearings to repeal the moratorium, Nukewatch members and supporters joined dozens of others to testify. We gathered with our local network and used presentations, letters to the editor, and protest to educate the public and Assembly representatives.

“After hearing this,” said State Representative Romaine Quinn who attended a Nukewatch-organized presentation by Dr. Laura Gauger, “no, I don’t find myself supporting the mining bill.” However, Quinn voted for repeal.

Prior to the repeal bill’s passage, the author, Sen. “Toxic” Tom Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst, said, “exploratory companies tell me they are back in play (in Wisconsin) if we change the law.” Tiffany predicted that the bill could prompt companies to start early exploration work for copper, zinc, gold and silver as early as 2018.

—Dr. Robert E. Moran, “Summary: Flambeau Mine: Water Contamination and Selective ‘Alternative Facts,’” April 2017; Ecowatch, Jan. 4, 2013

December 28, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Colin Kaepernick and the Myth of the “Good” Protest

By Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

**The Dallas Cowboys all took a knee Sept. 25, including team owner Jerry Jones, during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and police killings of unarmed African Americans. AP photo.**

The editors of GQ named the quarterback Colin Kaepernick its Citizen of the Year for his work protesting racial injustice. Mr. Kaepernick has been heavily criticized by people like President Trump, who claims that an NFL player who kneels during the playing of the national anthem “disrespects our flag” and should be fired. Others argue that he is out of bounds as an activist who mixes sports with politics.

The problem is that Mr. Kaepernick’s critics, and most of America, don’t really understand how protests work. Our textbooks and national mythology celebrate moments when single acts of civil disobedience, untainted by political organizations, seemed to change the course of history. But the ideal of the “good” protest—one that materialized from an individual’s epiphany—is a fantasy. More often, effective protest is like Mr. Kaepernick’s: it’s collective, and contingent, and all about long and difficult struggles.

Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat touched off the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, being fingerprinted by in Montgomery, Alabama, when she was among several others charged with violating segregation laws. Photo by Gene Herrick/AP

Consider what most Americans would agree were two “good” protests: Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the student sit-ins at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Parks, the story goes, was exhausted from a day’s work and took a seat in the “whites only” section. To the astonishment of onlookers, she refused to give up her seat when asked. In Greensboro, black college students decided to eat at the local five-and-dime and initiated the first sit-in at a segregated Southern restaurant. They were idealistic and perhaps naïve.

These stories follow a set narrative. They are “firsts”: the first time a black woman refused to give up her seat; or the first time students staged a sit-in. They seemed to arise spontaneously when someone fed up with unfair treatment couldn’t take it anymore. “Good” protesters act as individual citizens, untainted by associations with suspect political organizations.

The trouble is that these stories are historically inaccurate and obscure just how protest in the 20th century forged a more democratic country. A narrative with greater accuracy would allow us to better evaluate protests against racial discrimination. Earlier protests, similar to the one that Mr. Kaepernick started, sprang from protesters’ associations with activist organizations, were deeply political rather than individual, and played out in unfamiliar venues in new forms.
Protests that change history have their own long histories. They are almost never the first of their kind. Successful protesters plan campaigns, rather than respond to oppression in a single, spontaneous act. Protesters often belong to organizations that lend theoretical, moral and logistical support. Protests don’t reveal previously hidden wrongs to an unaware public. Instead, they cast those wrongs in a new light. They fail, time and time again. When they succeed, they win only partial victories.

Rosa Parks, for example, was a trained civil rights activist. She built on efforts that started in the 19th century to desegregate transportation and gained speed in the 1930s. In 1940, for example, Pauli Murray, a black woman, refused to give up her seat on a bus in Petersburg, Virginia.

Though most Americans today look back on the desegregation of public transportation with pride, most white Southerners opposed it vehemently, and many did so violently. During World War II, white passengers and bus drivers beat uniformed black soldiers who tried to integrate buses.

A. Philip Randolph knew that the emergency of war meant that these instances of discrimination ran counter to the nation’s interests. Randolph drew on his long experience as a labor leader to found the March on Washington Movement in 1941. The movement threatened to bring millions of African-Americans to Washington to protest. When President Franklin Roosevelt promised reforms, Randolph called off the march.

Throughout the war, the movement continued to train people who became civil rights protesters in the 1950s, including Pauli Murray. This pressure influenced the Supreme Court in 1946, which ordered desegregation on interstate buses in Morgan v. Virginia. That case set a precedent that Parks strategically worked to extend to local and state laws in Montgomery.

Just as Parks had done, the students sitting-in at the Woolworth counter in Greensboro, NC drew from a long history of struggle. African-Americans had been “stool sitting” since the early 1940s. Howard University students in Washington, DC staged some of the first sit-ins, which involved movement-trained protesters led by Murray. Those sit-ins aimed at national chain stores that operated outside the South, just as the Greensboro sit-ins purposefully did later. The Greensboro students knew all of this, because they were advised by the legendary organizer Ella Baker.

White Americans’ deep investment in the myth that the civil rights movement quickly succeeded based on individual protests has left the impression that organizations such as Black Lives Matter are counterproductive, even sinister. The same things were said of the NAACP.

Just as football players kneeling during the national anthem today must repeatedly insist that they are not protesting the flag, Parks and the Greensboro students had to fight against efforts to play down the stakes of their protests. Parks’s action was not about a seat in the front of the bus. It was about Jim Crow, a legal and social system of degradation. And as Baker argued in her speech “Bigger Than a Hamburger,” the Greensboro sit-ins marked the beginning of a fight for education, voting rights, and economic opportunity.

Rosa Parks was a hero. So were the students who sat in at the Woolworth lunch counters. But they knew that their heroism was possible only because of decades of what Baker called “spade work.” They knew that organizations to which they belonged and that gave them strength were the most recent manifestations of decades of struggle.

—Dr. Glenda Gilmore is a professor of history at Yale and a co-author most recently of These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present. She wrote this commentary for the New York Times.

December 28, 2017 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

Japan Could Dump 1 Million Tons of Radioactive Water into the Sea from Fukushima

Winter Quarterly 2017-18

By John LaForge

The new Chairman of Tepco Holding, Inc., Takashi Kawamura, caused a public uproar in the coastal fishing community last April when he reportedly declared that almost 1 million tons of contaminated waste water stored in tanks onshore would be dumped into the ocean.

“The decision has already been made,” Takashi Kawamura, said in a recent interview with the foreign media, Japan Times. Newsweek also reported July 14 that, Kawamura told the media that “nearly 777,000 tons of water tainted with tritium …will be dumped into the Pacific Ocean.”

But the company faced an immediate backlash, especially among fishers whose livelihoods have been devastated since the March 11, 2011 catastrophe, and quickly reversed itself. The company now says it has “no plans for an immediate release” and can keep storing water through 2020 or 2023.

British newspapers reported Nov. 27, that “there are 900 tanks that could spill if there is another earthquake or tsunami.”The New York Times said last March there were “1,000 gray, blue and white tanks on the grounds… [that] already hold 962,000 tons of contaminated water, and Tokyo Electric is installing more tanks.”

In May 2015, the International Atomic Energy Agency urged Japan to dump the waste water in the ocean, and in Sept. 2016, Dale Klein, a former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, recommended ocean dumping too, telling Bloomberg News that ocean dumping “will not be a safety issue, but it will be an emotional issue.” Klein added, “I get nervous about just storing all that water when you have about a thousand tanks. You have all the piping, all the valves, everything that can break.”

Scientists have declared the three-reactor disaster the worst radioactive contamination of the ocean in recorded history.

About 300 tons of ground water rushes into three reactor basements through earthquake-destroyed foundations, mixes with the melted uranium fuel rods and becomes tainted with radiation. The waste water is then pumped out and filtered through an experimental process called Advanced Liquid Processing System. ALPS separates most of the dangerous isotopes but can’t remove tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen. It is this “tritiated” water that is stored in the large tanks.

Japan’s government and Tepco argue that since nuclear reactors routinely release tritium to the air and water, the ocean dumping of 1 million tons of tritiated water to the sea would not be harmful.

Tritium is Dangerous, Long-Lived Cancer Agent

Tritium concentrates in aquatic organisms including algae, seaweed, crustaceans and fish. With a radioactive half-life of 12.3 years (half its radioactivity will decay in 12.3 years) it persists in the environment for 120 years.

Christina Mills, a staff scientist with the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) notes, that “tritium can cross the placenta, become incorporated into the embryo/fetus, and irradiate rapidly dividing cells, thereby raising the risk of malformations and early failed pregnancies. Given that all of a woman’s ova get made while she is still in her mother’s womb, the risks can be multi-generational.”

IEER President Dr. Arjun Makhijani, reports that “Tritium is a highly radioactive isotope of hydrogen…. Since tritium has the same chemical properties as hydrogen, it can combine with oxygen to form water. Such tritiated water is radioactive, and has become one of the problem pollutants at many nuclear facilities. In some places it has contaminated groundwater and surface water and continues to do so. … Commercial nuclear power plants also discharge tritium into public water bodies.

“Since tritiated water is processed by plants, animals and humans like ordinary water, the tritium in it can become transformed into other chemicals, such as proteins needed by the body. It can become part of the DNA. It can affect developing fetuses.”

Makhijani reminds readers further that “The established science is, and has been for some time, that there is no threshold for cancer risk of radiation and therefore no level of exposure is ‘safe.’ While it is true that we all are exposed to natural background radiation, this does not mean that natural background radiation is ‘safe.’”

—The London Independent, & the Metro online, Nov. 27, 2017; Japan Times, & Newsweek, July 14, 2017; New York Times, March 11, 2017; Bloomberg, Sept. 5, 2016; IEER Press Conference, Red Wing, MN, Feb. 8, 2012; IEER, “Statement on Tritium,” Feb. 6, 2006

**Some of the 1,000 hastily-built tanks holding over 900,000 tons of highly contaminated cooling water at the Fukushima-Daiichi complex.**

US Sailors Continue $1 Billion Class Action Against Tepco, General Electric

Dozens of Navy personnel who were aboard the aircraft carriers USS Ronald Reagan and USS Essex when they went to Fukushima in March 2011 to render aid to survivors, have since suffered unusual health problems including fatigue, weight loss, swollen limbs, joint pain, stomach ailments and diminished eyesight.

Stonewalled by the Navy, 420 sailors have joined a $1 billion class action lawsuit in federal court in San Diego against Fukushima’s owners, Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), and against General Electric which built the three destroyed reactors. Tepco and the Navy contend the sailors did not receive enough radiation exposure to have caused the illnesses. However, Japan, South Korea, and Guam later declared the USS Reagan too radioactive to enter their ports.

The court case is moving slowly—it was filed in 2012. According to Courthouse News, eight of the sailor-plaintiffs have already died—most from cancer—since the first case was filed. The sailors are represented by some high-profile attorneys, including, among others, former US Sen. John Edwards and his daughter Cate Edwards.

Cate Edwards told Courthouse News there are 23 plaintiffs living with cancer, many of whom served in Fukushima in their early 20s and some as young as 18. Beyond the group suffering cancer, many of the sailors have degenerative diseases, some have lost mobility, use of their arms and legs, some have back problems and eyesight loss.

A 26-month-old toddler born to a sailor-father who served in Fukushima died from brain and spine cancer. One female sailor opted to end a pregnancy after finding out the fetus had severe birth defects, Edwards reported. Another sailor, who was pregnant during the mission and her “Baby A.G.,” who was born in October 2011 with multiple genetic mutations, are also plaintiffs.

“Why are all these young, healthy, fit people getting cancer? Experiencing thyroid issues? It’s too strange to be a coincidence,” Edwards told Courthouse News. “That just doesn’t happen absent some external cause. All of these people experienced the same thing and were exposed to radiation at Fukushima. A lot of this is just common sense.”

No trial date has been set, but attorneys will argue a government “motion to dismiss” at a hearing Jan. 4. —Bianca Bruno, Courthouse News online, Nov. 29, 2017; Harvey Wasserman, EcoWatch/Nuclear, Feb. 26, 2014

Steel Maker Fraud Also Hit Reactors

For over 10 years, the Japanese manufacturing giant Kobe Steel falsified test data on certain substandard products to avoid the cost of massive do-overs. The scandal, in which the company faked data on the quality of aluminum, copper, wire and steel to cover-up unmet engineering standards, like strength. The fraud has impacted at least 500 industrial customers around the world where exacting safety requirements are vital, including builders of cars, bullet trains, aircraft and nuclear reactors. The country’s nearly collapsed nuclear power industry was also hit by the fraud. The Fukushima-Daini, on Japan’s northeast coast near the destroyed Fukushima-Daiichi complex, purchased some of Kobe Steel’s falsely certified copper piping. Tokyo Electric Power Co. claims that the substandard piping was never installed but was in storage.—New York Times, Oct. 14, Oct. 20, and Nov. 11, 2017

Tepco Starts Installing Device to Remove Wrecked Fuel from Reactor 3 Cooling Pool

Six and a half years since the three-reactor disaster began, Tepco just began installing equipment to be used for removing waste fuel rods from the heavily damaged storage pool for reactor 3. The equipment, weighing 72 tons, was lifted by two large cranes.

The storage pool, located in the reactor building on a floor 36 meters [ten stories] above ground level, holds 566 used and unused uranium fuel assemblies. Tepco plans to begin removing the fuel from the pool by the middle of next year. —The Japan Times, Nov. 12, 2017

Six Years Into Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors’ Melted Uranium Fuel

The Great Northeast Japan Earthquake and tsunami in 2011 caused a total loss of cooling at Fukushima-Daiichi. Over-heating of the fuel went out-of-control at three reactors and melted uranium fuel burned hot enough to torch through steel containment structures “and even penetrate the concrete floors below,” Martin Fackler reported. Engineers laboring to find it repeatedly failed in attempts to photograph the wreckage with radiation-proof robots. This summer, new models, redesigned after multiple failures, finally found the fuel in all three reactors. “I’ve been a robotic engineer for 30 years, and we’ve never faced anything as hard as this,” said Shinji Kawatsuma, a director at the Naraha Remote Technology Development Center. “Until now, we didn’t know exactly where the fuel was, or what it looked like,” said Takahiro Kimoto, a general manager for Tepco. Tepco executives said early on that no manual anywhere explained how to confront three simultaneous meltdowns. —New York Times, Nov. 19, 2017

December 21, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Presents Wrapped-up for Polluters & Arms Dealers

Federal Christmas presents are being lavished on toxic polluters, arms merchants, billionaires, and their Congressional lap dogs, while, as Zappa said, the meek shall inherit nothing.

As if pollution and graft made the country great, the Trump administration, with help from liberal Democrats, has been on a regulation-cancelling rampage, repealing rules on environmental protection, health care, financial services, and even internet accessibility. As of Dec. 15, Mr. Trump’s government-by-industrialists had revoked 67 rules, withdrawn 635 planned regulations, declared 244 rules “inactive,” and “delayed” 700 others.

Here at home, Rep. Rick Nolan, D-Crosby, managed to giftwrap for a foreign mining company the cancellation of an environmental study of mining in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The US Forest Service had been examining environmental risks of several large mining proposals near the BWCA.

The giant Antofagasta Corporation from Chile wants to dig a massive underground copper mine southeast of Ely near the Kawishiwi River which flows directly into and through the protected boundary waters. If the study had a chance of finding little risk of permanent mine pollution, Nolan and the billionaire Chileans would have allowed it to proceed. But copper mines always wreck surface and groundwater, so mine proponents zeroed out the study, and, voila, its absence makes the plan look clean as hell.

Nolan and Rep. Tom Emmer also handed copper interests the repeal of a temporary ban on mining near the cherished wilderness. In related pollutionism, Congress also revoked a law that penalized coal mining for destroying area streams.

Budget Cuts for the Least of These

Meanwhile, the Republicans’ October budget provides nuclear weapons systems with hundreds of billions, while gouging $1 trillion from Medicaid and nearly $500 billion from Medicare. The government intends to spend about $40 billion every year for nine years on nuclear weapons programs, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s report “Projected Costs of US Nuclear Forces, 2017 to 2026.” Plans put forward by the Pentagon and the Energy Department would cost $400 billion over this period.

Of the $400 billion, the CBO estimates that Congress will approve $189 billion for new long-range jet bombers, long-range land-based missiles, and ballistic missile submarines; $9 billion for new short-range nuclear bombs and missiles; $87 billion for national laboratories that design and produce the new warheads, missiles and bombs; and $58 billion for nuclear war communications and warning systems. The remaining $56 billion of the $400 billion estimate is the CBO’s idea of likely cost overruns.

These estimates include the projected costs of new weapons that aren’t yet approved. Funds for a new long-range, land-based missile to replace today’s 450 have not been appropriated (and high-ranking military and civilian authorities have publicly attacked the plan saying they should be abolished, not replaced). The Long-range Stand Off missile — a nuclear-armed Cruise missile — has also been called unnecessary and destabilizing by former Secretaries of Defense and other experts. Still, both systems are expected by the CBO to see development take off in the coming years.

Senate Finance Committee Chair: “We don’t have money anymore”

While debating the Republican’s $1.5 trillion tax cut, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-UT, spoke about the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) which needs $15 billion (its appropriation expired last Oct. 1). CHIP subsidizes exams, doctor visits, prescriptions and other health care for children in 9 million low-income families across the country.

Hatch actually said: “[L]et me tell you something: … the reason CHIP’s having trouble is because we don’t have money anymore.” As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Mr. Hatch just gave away 100 times the CHIP budget in a tax cut that aids high-income industrialists.

Navy submarines that fire long-range nuclear weapons are called Trident subs and the military wants to replace them all. The CBO report says that about $90 billion over 10 years should cover the cost of two new subs and plans for a third.

With Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles or ICBMs, the plan was to spend $43 billion over 10 years to make changes to the current missiles. But with plans for an all-new missile, former Sec. of Defense William Perry has said it will cost $100 billion.

An all-new long-range heavy jet bomber (sometimes alarmingly dubbed the “China bomber”) may cost $43 billion over 10 years. But then since “we don’t have money anymore,” the program may have to be renamed “Medicaid” or “Medicare” so that its budget can be trimmed. — John LaForge

December 14, 2017 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

America is Hard to Find

By JOHN HEID

When I was 13 my mother announced to me: “I want you to meet your elderly Aunt Mary before she dies.” Without further discussion mother sent me off to Glassport, Penn. for a weekend visit. I’d never met Aunt Mary, and all I knew was that she didn’t speak a lick of English—and I no Polish. I was not fired up about spending the weekend with her. Following mother’s orders none the less, off I went on the Greyhound for three days that keep coming to mind every time the burning matter of immigration flares up.

I fell into the rabbit hole of culture shock meeting the Ruthkowski side of my otherwise very German family. These folks were a passel of blood relatives who spoke differently, kept their homes differently, and cooked differently than in my house. And I had the time of my life, language barriers notwithstanding. We were family, tho’ culturally miles apart. Without saying a word of English, Aunt Mary opened windows in my mind, and widened, if just a bit, my view of what America looks like.

Flash forward a couple decades to Baltimore in the mid ‘80s. I was serving 6 months in a federal halfway house on the far east side of the city. Every inmate was required to work outside the facility and I was granted permission to do my work hours as a volunteer at Viva House, the Catholic Worker several miles across town. Four days a week I would peddle across the city on my bicycle through neighborhoods I never knew existed, let alone been in. I recall hearing language after language flowing through the open windows into the sultry, summery streets of Baltimore as I passed by. And the fragrances coming from the kitchens linger in my taste buds. Each neighborhood unique. One city. Many cultures. Side by side.

Every time I see somebody wearing a cap that reads “Make America Great Again” a tidal wave of questions arise. What is America? Who is American? Who am I looking at? Where am I looking? And when, if ever, was it great? When wasn’t it?

For starters the term “America” is an incomplete, specious, and culturally challenged moniker for the United States. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, writes in An Indigenous Peoples’ History Of The United States: “I refrain from using ‘America’ and ‘American’ when referring to the United States and its citizens. Those blatantly imperialistic terms annoy people in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, who are, after all, also Americans.”

The Earth has just gone full circle around the sun since the last US presidential election. I call 2017 the year of the looking glass, which culminates years of navel gazing. The deep rifts in the core values of our nation have been exposed. They are in our face. The comeuppance was inevitable. These differences didn’t happen overnight, any more than earthquakes do. The tectonic plates of sociological structures move slowly, often imperceptibly. Voices at the edge have been warning us for decades—even longer, from the beginning. Our history celebrates and haunts us; mostly from the closet. Now we’re face to face with ourselves. The emperor’s clothes lie scattered on the ground, alongside ours. And our national wounds are exposed to the light of day.

“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame and so ugly.” —James Baldwin, “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Notes,” The Cross of Redemption

I believe that self-education is a worthy first step to unraveling our national identity crisis. Or better said, we need to undo the single course menu of US history we’ve been spoon fed from the get go. In his 1963 “A Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin wrote: “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has said about it.”

A worthy remedial education course could begin with Ms. Dunbar-Ortiz’s Indigenous Peoples’ History, Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States, Kim E. Nielsen’s A Disability History of the United States. Not to mention Howard Zinn’s masterpiece A People’s History of the United States.

Then comes the disciple of critical listening. And to whom shall we listen? How about First Nations people for openers? Those who were here before the conquest, before there was a United States. In An Indigenous Peoples’ History, Willie Johns, from Brighton Seminole Reservation in Florida says, “We are here to educate, not forgive. We are here to enlighten, not accuse.”

In poetic form Langston Hughes weighs in: “Say, who are you that mumbles in the back? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? / I am the poor white fooled and pushed apart, / I am the negro bearing slavery’s scars. / I am the red man [sic] driven from the land, / I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek– / And finding the same old stupid plan / Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. / Let America Be America Again” (an excerpt)

The task of remembering rounds out the prescription for our identity dilemma. Angela Davis reminds us, “We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.”

Re-membering is, after all, simply putting together the myriad stories of all those who inhabit this land thereby exposing and breaking through the cycle of cultural amnesia.

Where do we go from here? There are no quick fixes. No one-size-fits-all legislation. A change in Administrations in and of itself does not interrupt the status quo of colonization and its subsequent repression. Revolution? Isn’t that what got us here in the first place? Perhaps, what is needed is a revolution of heart, as Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker said.

“O let America be America again– / The land that never has been yet– / And yet must be–the land where every man [sic] is free. / The land that’s mine–the poor man’s [sic], Indians, Negroes, ME” —Langston Hughes

I can imagine my beloved Aunt Mary smiling over a platter of steaming homemade pierogis smothered in buttered onions saying, “Eat and you will eventually understand.” #####

Presents Wrapped-up for Polluters & Arms Dealers

America is Hard to Find

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