You will find very little, though, about the climate crisis or the fact that we are in uncharted territory with the release of carbon dioxide from the arctic tundra.  No longer a “carbon sink,” the arctic tundra shifts now to be a source of carbon dioxide thus auguring in a future of accelerated warming temperatures.  The parallel catastrophe to the growing likelihood of nuclear bombs being used, has been relegated to back page news.  Climate scientists can barely find an audience for their despairing pleas.

On Sunday January 18, 2025, from 12:15 to 3pm in the Second Congregational Church, an event in Franklin Country will lift us above this downward spiraling existential reality.  It is appropriately called Our Projects for 2025: Envisioning the World We Want.  Their efforts will bring together dozens of organizations, each with a singular mission but all epitomized as doing social and environmental good. The sponsors include Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution, Traprock Center for Peace and Justice, Western MA CODEPINK, the Interfaith Council, Amherst Young Feminist Party and more than twenty-five other participating cosponsors.  This coalition group aims to provide an alternative vision by creating a public conversation with community organizations ranging from peace and justice, reproductive rights, creative education and housing initiatives, to free food for those who need it, justice for the imprisoned and for civil and immigrant rights, as well as for climate action.

The program includes speakers; singalong music, with songs from local musicians; space to share information and meet with those who are dedicated to particular organization missions; and a simple lunch provided by those organizing the event.

The local event replicates the Peoples’ March (formerly Women’s March) in Washington DC and hundreds of others across the country held on the same day – each challenging the necropolitics of our times.  They aim to make the weekend of January 17-20 a weekend of Help Not Hate, as a way to honor Martin Luther King and show the politics of democracy, resistance to inequality and intolerance are ways to strengthen, not divide, our local communities.

What is striking about these gatherings is the organizers.  It is primarily women from diverse interests working at the community level to build a cohesive movement from the bottom up across the country.  They stand in contrast to the nearly 100 percent men at the top in our country that gain their cohesion from hostility. 

“March,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2024

Equally striking is the style of women at the community level and men at the top.  The women’s groups and other like-minded groups across the country have more firmly than ever resolved to organize in mass resistance to the anti-humanist, anti-feminist, anti-democratic in-your-face politics here in the US.  And that is why – no matter the obstacles we face, we have no time for despair.

Neither political party has shown any moral authority on Israel.  A Senate majority recently voted to approve $61 million in mortar rounds to Israel with only 19 democratic and 1 independent senator voting against the measure.  Bernie Sanders has finally called out the ruling class of American for what it is – an oligarchy, a government of a few with influence because of money, politics, and corporate and military power.  But it did not start with Trump – it was with us before Trump and is not only a Republican phenomenon.

If we are to have a future, and not crumble like the Roman Empire over time, the people must lead with their moral vision of a government uncorrupted by corporate influence and money with a deep and meaningful commitment to being the party of the people.  Most of the public do not feel they participate meaningfully in the political system.  “A meaningful democracy would give the public the lead role forming those decisions…reflecting everyone’s active participation and deliberation.”

The United Nations lowered the U.S. ranking to #41 among nations in 2022 due to the extreme gap between the rich and the rest and women’s loss of reproductive freedom. Elsewhere the U.S. ranks as a “flawed democracy” because of its severely fractured society.  These ongoing societal failures feed a continuous decline in health, such that we now ranks 48^th among 200 countries in life expectancy, while having the largest number by far of billionaires and millionaires compared to other wealthy countries.  Corporate lobbies for the weapons industry, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, processed foods, etc. dictate our federal government’s priorities while 78% of US people live paycheck to paycheck.

Blessed is the Poor People’s Campaign: This national campaign in more than 45 states is organized around the needs and demands of the 140 million poor and low income Americans.  Its vision to restructure our society from the bottom up, recognizes “we must…deal with the interlocking injustices of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation and the denial of health care, militarism and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism that blames the poor instead of the systems that cause poverty.”  Add sexism to that list of injustices.

Blessed is Fair Share Massachusetts, a coalition of labor unions and dozens of community and faith-based organizations that won passage of the Fair Share Amendment in 2022. The constitutional amendment has instituted a 4% surcharge on annual income over $1 million.  In 2024 the $1.8 billion accrued from the tax on millionaires provides free school meals; free community college; and funds to invest in roads, bridges, and public transit. 

In 1948, the United States signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which recognizes adequate housing as one cornerstone of the right to an adequate standard of living. All 27 European Union (EU) member states as well as Australia and South Africa institutionalized housing as a human right for their citizens while the United States has not.  In every state except Oregon and Wyoming, it can be illegal to be homeless, essentially casting blame on 650,000 adults and over 2 million children for their poverty-stricken homelessness

Blessed is Rosie’s Place, a model to our country of woman-centered humanism.  Much more than a shelter, it is a mecca and “a second chance for 12,000 poor and homeless women each year” in Boston.  Rosie’s Place was founded on Easter Sunday 1974 in an abandoned supermarket, as the first shelter for women in the country.  From providing meals and sanctuary from the streets, it grew into a multi-service community center that offers women emergency shelter and meals plus support and tools to rebuild their lives.  Rosie’s offers a food pantry, ESOL classes, legal assistance, wellness care, one-on-one support, housing and job search services, and community outreach.  Ninety percent of homeless women have suffered severe physical or sexual abuse at some time in their lives.

Blessed are the nearly 3000 domestic violence shelters and groups organized throughout the U.S. to provide temporary shelter and help women re-build their lives, offering legal assistance, counselling, educational opportunities and multi-services for their children.

“Beating the Blues,” Digital, Midjourney / Clip2Comic, 2024

A recent Gallup Survey found that the U.S. ranks last among comparable nations in trust of their government and major institutions, including business leaders, journalists and reporters, the medical system, banks, public education and organized religion – a plunge from top of the list nearly 20 years ago.

Blessed is Hands Across the Hills, a blue-state red-state seven-year effort formed after Donald Trump’s 2016 election to bring together progressive residents in western Massachusetts and more conservative residents of rural eastern Kentucky, for conversations and sometimes intense dialogues about their political and cultural differences.  They disputed the idea, “that we are hopelessly divided, as a myth sold to us by politicians and mass media, to hide our nation’s all-too-real inequalities.”

Blessed are the peacemakers across dozens of federal agencies, including the military and in communities throughout the country who challenge, resist, resign and refuse orders in our flawed hyper-militaristic government. Since the US-enabled genocide in Gaza, more than 250 veterans and active-duty soldiers have become members, respectively, of About Face: Veterans Against the War,  Feds for Peace, Service in Dissent, and A New Policy PAC.  All have arisen from current and former federal employees aligned with the majority of Americans who want the Israeli-US war on Gaza (now expanded to Lebanon and the West Bank) to end through diplomacy.

Blessed are those of the people, for the people and by the people – beacons in a country sundered by militarism, rich privilege, origins in slavery and genocide of Native Americans, and persistent inequality of women.

I then decided to explore the question with friends, including a retired teacher; a writer, a truckdriver, a community activist, a certified nursing assistant (CNA), and a poet.  And here is what they had to say.

“Walking in nature, I feel at peace.  I can hear that still small voice inside me, which we all have, that is often obscured in the hustle and bustle of daily life.”                                                                                                …….

Another said, “Because I have been living with Stage 4 cancer for over 6 years, I am focusing each day on becoming more deeply my true self.  I spent my first 17 years dodging the daily penalties of being myself. I learned by the age of 4 that in order to survive (at least psychically), I needed to follow my mother’s rules to the “t.”  Those rules made me small.

So, in these remaining days, I am consciously asking myself how I want to interact with the world around me.  I feel my true self when I communicate honestly – my values, passions, fears, joys, and decisions — not in a way to be contentious, but simply to let others know who I am — the deep, wide person I have always been.”

         ……

“When I am behind the wheel of the truck [an 18-wheeler]. I’m happy with what I do and it gives me purpose, moreso since my wife died.  It helped me get through.”

         ……                                                                                              ——

         “When I am walking in nature, stopping every few moments to gaze at a life form that astonishes me with its beauty—then I feel my truest self. I am one of those life forms (not the chief one) and an admirer and comrade of all the others.

When I set aside my own concerns of the moment and listen with full attention and compassion to another and with my listening provide the condition for her to find a portion of her truth and bring that truth out into the world, I feel my truest self. The world acts as if speaking is the big deal. It is a big deal but give listening its due: Deep listening enables speech. And as for compassion: There is a kind of knowledge that cannot form inside someone, cannot exist, without the presence of compassion.” 

         ——

“’Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, “‘You are not an isolated being. You are made of ancestors… There is no separate self.  We are a current.  We are a stream. We are a continuation.’” I was born in the babble of Stonecoal Creek, lapping the banks of Besoco, West Virginia. I am a wave in the mountain streams of my ancestors. We are one tributary, each generation flowing into the next.

My true self appears as a turtle, bravely and quietly revealing its sunbaked head in tender moments, in which the interconnectedness of life, and the spirits of my ancestors, and the shared trust of a vulnerable heart are all felt, or in the peaceful ambiance of a solitary occasion, before retreating to its hard shell.”

……

“When I am hiking in nature where I feel the true beauty of life.”

Pondering the question When am I my true self also led me back to some of the most authentic human statements/actions I have encountered over the years of writing on war and peace: those of veterans who spoke searingly against the immorality of the wars in which they fought.  Tens of thousands of US recruits and soldiers have declared themselves conscientious objectors to war, have gone AWOL or refused to re-deploy, risked prison, rejected their war medals in a public act of conscience. Their voices, like that of poet Namaya, have a deeply moral tenor:

“I burn with the shame
Of our wars!

Our shame should burn as bright
as the phosphorous bombs
that we dropped in Vietnam…”

This past August three 18-year-old Israeli conscientious objectors “declared their refusal to enlist” in required military service. Their reasons rise from the depths of their true, ethical selves.

Yuval Moav: “If you ask me why I refuse today, the answer is, ultimately, because of refusing to participate in genocide. I’ve been met with violence [for my decision]; but I will keep going.  The war has only strengthened my decision.”

Oryan Mueller: “Refusal is like holding up a mirror to Israeli society, first of all to show that it is possible to resist the militaristic death machine and the cycle of bloodshed. We don’t have to take part in it.”

Itamar Greenberg: “After growing up in an ultra-Orthodox home…I left religion and…this directed me to justice…I think the decision to refuse is a direct result of that.”

May they inspire their generation everywhere.

The water crisis in Gaza is a problem of daunting proportions, with grave implications for the more than 2 million inhabitants of the Palestinian enclave.  The Coastal Aquifer from which Gaza pumps water is diminishing; but more dangerously, it is experiencing significant deterioration from seawater and highly saline groundwater intrusion, as well as sewage pollution.  

Fast forward to 2024: Gaza’s water scarcity pollution is severely worsened by its forced closure of water and wastewater treatment plants due to Israel’s blockade of fuel to Gaza to run the plants in its 2023-2024 war.

The authors of the Saving Gaza Begins with Its Water end in a cautiously positive note.  The crisis of water in Gaza also holds promise, they wrote because Gaza’s water problem will require cooperation between antagonists, to their mutual benefit. There is no solution that can be achieved by Gaza or Israel in isolation because one of Israel’s water sources is the same Coastal Aquifer.

But this affirmative conclusion presumes that the people of Gaza have not been annihilated by Israeli bombing, inflicting a daily death rate greater than any major war of the 21^st century, combined with the induced famine across all of Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid, and rampant disease including the recent polio virus.  At the current rate of killing and death, 15 to 20% of Gaza’s people could be dead by the end of the year, a UN expert stated and almost entirely exterminated within a few years.

“Ground Water,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

Prior to the current war, Gaza had 150 small-scale desalination plants to produce potable water.  By mid-October 2023, Israeli missile attacks destroyed the drinking water desalination plants; and its almost total blockade cut off fuel to run the other water treatment plants, as well as metal parts to repair them.  Gaza’s drinking water production capacity dropped to just 5 percent of typical levels,

With no power to run Gaza’s five wastewater treatment plants, sewage has flowed freely through the streets, causing a record increase in cases of diarrheal illnesses.  By December 2023, cases of diarrhea among children under 5 in Gaza jumped 2000%, because of which children under five are over 20 times more likely to die than from Israeli military violence.

More than three quarters of Gaza’s 2.2 million people are internally displaced to southern Gaza and, even there, continually forced to re-locate because of Israeli bombing.  In some of the most overcrowded shelters in southern Gaza there is one toilet per 600 internally displaced persons and little to no running water. 

Every human being in Gaza suffers soul-shattering existence from this war variably described as genocide, ecocide, domicide (destruction of homes) and scholasticide (destruction of schools and universities). Indeed, two American trauma surgeons who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s genocide in Gaza.  Women and their children are its gravest victims: 70% of those killed are women and children.  Daily in Gaza children are having one of both legs amputated without anesthesia.  More than 17,000 children have lost 1 or both parents.  

Recently American doctors who volunteered in Gaza and spoke at a press conference during the Democratic National Convention accused the Biden administration of “hypocritical action” in saying they are working on cease-fire while providing the weapons massacring Gazans.  They pleaded with Kamala Harris to “embrace an arms embargo on Israel and immediate cease-fire.” The doctors attested that the killing and suffering is on “an entirely unprecedented scale.”  None has seen anything “so horrific, so egregious, so inhumane.”

Impacts of war on women

As of early 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but lack adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, soap, running water and toilets because of the war nor privacy to manage menstrual hygiene.  These conditions put women and girls in Gaza at grave risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections.  The challenge of trying to find an available bathroom is especially difficult for pregnant women who have pressure on their bladder, and women who have just given birth and are going through weeks of postpartum bleeding.

By early March 2024 Relief/Web reported: there has been a steep rise in malnutrition among the more than 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women. Every day about 180 women give birth in unimaginable conditions, no longer having health-care facilities to deliver their babies.   Many mothers who have given birth since the beginning of Israel’s war are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns.

Although mothers and adult women are tasked with sourcing food, they are the ones who eat last, less, and least.

What can be done? Nothing without Israel and the United States agreeing to end their totalistic war.   Dima Nazzal, a systems engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology believes that while rebuilding Gaza is “a daunting prospect,” with “cooperation, coordination and courage, it is achievable.”  But “the war must be ended.”

Israel has sought security through militaristic means since its founding: expelling 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 (the Nakba – “catastrophe” in Arabic), claiming Palestinian land by force, apartheid conditions for Palestinians in Israel, establishing colonizing settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and now omnicide in Gaza.  The only way for Israel to live in security is through a political compromise, in the spirit of Isaiah 59:8, that guarantees the human and political rights of the Palestinians who have lived on the land of Palestine for thousands of years.  Without justice – the US ending its criminal trafficking of weapons to Israel, a permanent ceasefire, the UN recognizing Palestine as a state and then organizing the rebuilding of Gaza with supportive countries – there can be no peace.

Pat Hynes gave a talk on the plight of women in water-starved Gaza during a conference on  Memorial Day weekend sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom entitled Water on the Frontlines for Peace. This piece is a much abbreviated and updated version.

Putting humans at the top of the evolution chain as the crown of intelligent life, a western worldview, is–as some keenly grasp–mistaken.  The baleful consequences of this simplistic hierarchy are everywhere: out-of-control climate, accelerating rates of animal and plant extinction, dead zones in the oceans and mass mortality of coral reefs; the vast pollution of land, air and water and the mounting likelihood of human extinction with nuclear war.  All caused by humans, humans with financial and political power much more egregiously than others.

Certain scientists who study plants–from the simplest to the exotic–are stirring controversy with their “Are plants intelligent?”  Consider that we humans owe our lives to plants for their food, medicines, and critical balance of 21% oxygen in air we breathe.  If our human intelligence has discerned over thousands of years which plants are edible and nutritious and healing, wouldn’t the evolutional ingenuity of plants which feed and sustain us and all life also constitute intelligence?

“Plant Intelligence,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v. 3, 2024

Studies have found that elephants recognize themselves in a mirror; crows create tools; dolphins demonstrate empathy and playfulness; and cats exhibit similar styles of attachment as human toddlers.  The given explanation is that they have brains with neurological capacity for consciousness and intelligence.

But plants do not have a central brain.  Could their mode of learning to evade insect predators and maximize their growth come from a diverse form of intelligence, possibly be distributed across their roots, stems and leaves?  Could the whole plant, then, function as a brain?  Recent studies of plants have stirred the possibility that they are conscious and intelligent.  Take communication, something we humans claim as our domain through language and more recently acknowledge that animals also possess.

Botanists have found that not only do alder and willow trees alter their leaf chemistry to defend themselves against an invasion of tent caterpillars, but that leaves of faraway trees also change their chemical composition similarly.   Warned, as they are, by airborne plant chemicals released from the original trees under attack.   Goldenrods signal an attack by a predator through strong chemical communication sent to all other goldenrod neighbors, just as humans warn their neighbors about a nearby fire or flood or crime. 

Without any recognizable ears, plants sense sounds.  The vibration of a predator insect chewing on its leaves causes a plant to make its own defensive pesticide.  Beach evening primrose responds to the sound of honeybees in flight by increasing the sweetness of its nectar to attract them for pollination.  Tree roots grow toward the sound of running water, including in pipes, where the roots often burst through causing great difficulties for municipalities.  How do the various plants hear these stimulating sounds?

Plants have memory, some anticipating from past experience when a pollinator will show up for the plants’ pollen.  Plants express social intelligence: members of the pea family form relationships with bacteria living in their roots to have the bacteria supply beneficial nitrogen for the plants’ growth.  Several kinds of plants provide a home and food for compatible ants who then attack the plants’ ant pests.  Perhaps you have you noticed that late summer asters and goldenrod tend to grow as companions.  Why? Together–their combined beauty–attracts more pollinators.

In finishing, I express my immense respect for the indigenous worldview where wind, rocks, air and rain are our kin, together with plants and nonhuman animals.  We, humans, the most recent beings, depend on all of these elder kin; and this awareness, this worldview of connectivity among all beings, is our path back to Earth well-being. 

Featured Image, “Web of Intelligent Life,” Digital, Dream / Realistic v. 2, 2024

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – As I write, five of nine governments with arsenals of nuclear weapons – capable of destroying life on our planet many times over – are engaged in war: the United States (in multiple wars and stoking one with China), Israel, Russia, and NATO members Britain and France in a proxy war with Russia. For decades now, respected nuclear weapons scientists and policymakers have estimated each January how close we are as a world to civilization-ending disaster, by setting the hands of the Doomsday Clock, where Midnight represents apocalyptic nuclear war. In January 2024, the Doomsday clock was set at 90 seconds to Midnight, the closest it has ever been since its inception in 1947. Throughout 2023 nuclear nations spent 13% more than in 2022 on necrophilic nuclear weapons with the US accounting for 80% of this increase–all while we rush headlong into climate disaster, so palpable this summer. How much closer to Midnight will we be in January 2025?

As a counterbalance to this insanity, we have the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons adopted in 2017 by 122 sensible non-nuclear weapon States. The Treaty entered into force in 2021. By January 2024, 93 countries had signed the Treaty and 70 countries ratified it with more on the way. This UN Treaty is our best insurance as a world against any nuclear weapons use and has as its goal their complete elimination.

“Hiroshima,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v. 3 / IbisPaint, 2024

But, what can we do as citizens living in a country whose government first developed nuclear weapons; used them on Japanese civilians on August 6 and 9, 1945; and led the arms race ever since? The U.S. spent nearly $98,000 per minute in 2023 on modernizing nuclear weapons and now stands on the brink of using them again given its war-prone posture in the world.

Back from the Brink, a national nuclear weapons abolition organization “believes that we all deserve a say on policies that pose a direct threat to our lives, our families, our communities, our planet, humanity’s future.” A major priority of Back from the Brink is to engage and cultivate leadership in local cities, towns and states to influence federal legislation and policy ultimately to abolish nuclear weapons. One creative suggestion they urge is to ask our local and state politicians to issue a Proclamation on the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 and 9), signaling that “abolishing nuclear weapons and preventing nuclear war is every community’s business.”

In that spirit, here is the Resolution we have asked Greenfield, MA Mayor Ginny Desorgher to send to the city’s state and federal elected officials on behalf of her citizens.

“Whereas, a world in which nuclear weapons exist and threaten our community and humanity’s very existence is a deeply unjust world;

Whereas, seventy-nine years ago, on August 6th and August 9, hundreds of thousands of human beings died – many instantly– or suffered severe health consequences in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan when the United States dropped atomic bombs;

Whereas, many people and communities within the United States have been and continue to be grievously harmed and suffer health consequences from the development, production and testing of nuclear weapons and uranium mining;

Whereas, nine nations collectively have approximately 12,100 nuclear weapons in their arsenals, most of which are far more destructive than those used against the people of Japan. The detonation of even a small number of these weapons could affect everyone on the planet, causing catastrophic human and environmental consequences that would threaten human civilization itself;

Whereas, current Cold War-era nuclear policies and spending are contributing to a costly new global arms race, do not make any nuclear-armed country safer and increase the risk of nuclear war;

Whereas, in 2023 U.S. taxpayers in Greenfield spent $4,033,796.19 cents on nuclear weapons–funds which would be better spent addressing urgent community needs for housing, education, infrastructure, jobs, health care, poverty alleviation, climate resilience and environmental protection;

Whereas, the people of Greenfield join with the people of Hiroshima in their plea “that all cities and citizens of the world unite together in expanding the circle of solidarity transcending national boundaries, partisan politics, and religious creeds to strengthen the bond of human friendship and solidarity.”

NOW, THEREFORE, I THE MAYOR OF GREENFIELD, DO HEREBY PROCLAIM AUGUST 6 AND AUGUST 9 TO BE:
LIFTING COMMUNITY VOICES FOR A WORLD FREE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS DAY

Consider asking your Mayor or Town Council to issue a similar proclamation, if not for this year, then for 2025. But start now.

The war on women is everywhere: in the home, locally, nationally and globally.

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – In 2018, the US National Sexual Violence Resource Center published that 81% of women reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault in their lifetime.  Further, the majority of violence against women is perpetrated by male intimate partners and acquaintances.

There are myriad other misogynist wars on women worldwide – including military wars; sex trafficking, prostitution and pornography; the theft of female and lesbian sexual identity by some in the trans movement; child marriage, female genital mutilation, and so on.  But none at this moment is so intensive as Israel’s and the US’ genocidal war on Gaza: 70 percent of those killed are women and their children.   Israel’s bombing of hospitals with maternity wards; the starvation of pregnant and breast-feeding women and the record-acute malnutrition among newborns and young children speak loud and clear — End Palestinian women’s potential to give life and the survival of Palestinian babies and children.

How cruelly ironic that as US weapons murder life in Gaza and elsewhere in the world with impunity, 14 US states have criminalized women’s choice of abortion as murder, not even allowing abortion for the hateful acts of rape or incest, six more states have early gestational limits. There were 65,000 rape-related pregnancies between July 2022 and January 2024 in those US states banning or putting extreme limits on abortion, with the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision.

Today a majority of US-adults including from every religion, race, ethnicity; moderate and liberal Republicans and a vast majority of Democrats (women and men), agree that abortion should be legal. Thus, the end of Roe v Wade in the 2022 Dobbs’ Supreme Court decision is a both a War on Women and a War on Democracy, given that the will of the majority of US citizens does not prevail nor influence government policy. 

According to the Economist, the United States ranks among “flawed democracies.”   Another recent, comprehensive study of democracies worldwide concluded that “only 15 percent of people globally live in places where women and lower income groups have at least somewhat equal access to power.”  No surprise that the US, cluelessly vaunted as the indispensable nation, is not one of them.

What fuels the control of women’s bodies in our country?  It is misogyny and injustice.  After all, there is no comparable moral or medical control of men’s bodies.

Yet the moralistic urgency to preserve life in the womb evaporates once a poor child is born.  One in six children under five years of age lives in poverty – the highest rate of all industrial countries; four million youth are homeless.  Clearly, controlling a woman’s right to her own body, is not about the unborn’s right to life; otherwise, all kinds of social legislation for maternal and child health, adequate housing, a living wage, and well-funded education would accompany legislation criminalizing women for abortion. 

Regarding women’s loss of economic democracy, women have higher rates of poverty than men.  And why?  For at least three reasons:

1.)   Domestic violence causes women victims to lose altogether an average of 8 million days of paid work per year and is a strong factor in women’s homelessness.

2.)    Women’s reproductive labor – giving birth, breastfeeding and caring for children is not compensated with free childcare and paid parental leave in the United States, unlike all other comparable countries. Thus, women who give birth are cheated of savings, pensions and Social Security.  No surprise then that the greatest risk factor for being poor in old age is having been a mother..

3.)   More women than men struggle to cover everyday expenses due to the gender wage gap, which has remained stagnant for 20 years – at 82% – a significant factor contributing to the substantial disparity in poverty rates between women and men age 75 and older.  Even for college graduates in 2024 the same economic inequality persists: male college graduates have been hired at an average sightly over $30/hour; women, at slightly over $25/hour. This wage inequality of 82% will follow these women college graduates all their working lives and in retirement.

Salary is symbolic: Why are we women worth 82% of men in the workplace?.

Ponderous realities:

More American lives were lost in the 20^th century through violence against women than during all 20^th century wars and civil strife.  Yet, while thousands of monuments throughout the United States honor those who lost their lives for their country in war, only one —the first of its kind—is currently being planned for women who lost their lives giving birth to the country’s children.  The counterpoint reality is that feminist revolutions to gain human rights and equality for women (however incomplete that goal remains) have freed and saved the lives of millions of women and girls—without weapons, without fists, and without a drop of blood spilled.  

Women have more than a lot that men can learn from: men commit 90% of homicides and almost all sexual violence; men are the primary wagers of war.  Were our skills, our social and intellectual intelligence, and our wisdom valued and promoted in all places of social and political decision-making: in every home and all national governments and the UN, the world might get a chance at global peace and restoring our beautiful planet.

*Given as the keynote talk at Bigger than Dobbs:  The War on Women and War on Democracy, a June 23 event sponsored by the Reproductive Justice Task Force of Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution with multiple co-sponsors.  

Speeches of the presenters will be available soon at http://www.fccpr.us 

Related Video link added by IC: MSNBC: “How GOP may lose 24: Trump conviction collides with MAGA legal ‘war’ on women, minorities, equality”

LET GAZA LIVE

FREE PALESTINE

CEASEFIRE – NO ARM$ TO ISRAEL

NEVER AGAIN FOR ANYONE

Why? 

Johanna (Jo) Rosen stands on the Common because she is “heartbroken and outraged by the death, destruction and displacement in Gaza.”  As a Jewish American, she believes she has “a particular responsibility to speak out against the US government’s material and diplomatic support for Israel and its military aggression…I am motivated,” she adds, “to build the world we want to live in where everyone has a safe home, healthy food, clean water, and can celebrate their culture in dignity.”

Since last October, Jo, a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, has called Congress almost daily, written letters to newspapers, participated in marches and rallies, donated to aid and advocacy organizations.  She joined hundreds of activists to disrupt the State of the Union address and works to support the students at Smith College, her alma mater, advocating for the college to divest from weapons manufacturers. 

Lianna Hart “feels powerless to stop” the war in Gaza” and simultaneously complicit in it as a taxpayer in the United States and as a Jewish American who was raised believing in Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.” As Americans, we “cannot pretend…that we are not complicit in these atrocities…The least we can do is show up in our communities and say that we do not agree, that we refuse to watch this happen without speaking up against it.” 

Standing on the Common with others, holding her artist-made Free Palestine, she finds the moments of connection with those driving and walking by who give “just a honk, a wave, a thumbs up” motivating.  For her, “visibility is meaningful, we cannot and should not go about our lives as if this war isn’t happening.”  Like Jo, Lianna has been engaged in many and various actions in western Mass, organized or co-hosted by Jewish Voice for Peace and other organizations.  She, too, donates to many relief and aid organizations working with Gazans suffering from this genocidal war.

Theirs are just two passionate, moral voices of many dozens who have gathered with us each Saturday for months, reinvigorating our years of standing on the Common against war and for peace with justice.

Those of us, whose activism on behalf of peace and justice was sparked by the US war of aggression in Vietnam or the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Movement, the Environmental Movement (and, for some, all of these movements) are now joined with these younger generations.  They match our generations’ passionate protests; and we are heartened, energized, inspired by their integrity and deeply grateful to them.

Related video: NM PBS: “Jewish Voice for Peace Stands with Students”

Together we express what a majority of Americans polled recently support: that the U.S. call for a permanent ceasefire and stop sustaining Israel’s genocidal war with our government’s military aid and weapons.   Ranging in age from our 80s to early 20s, we also stand together in supporting student encampments on their university and college campuses across the country, calling for their administration to divest from necrophilous weapons industries that are sucking up profits from the deaths of Gazans, 70 percent of whom are women and children.

Despite what mainstream news chooses to carry – mainly photos of violence in student encampments, and President Biden recklessly defending police crackdowns on students causing “chaos,” the evidence gathered reveals the opposite.  A study of 553 campus protests between April 18 and May 3 across the country found that 97% “remained non-violent” and peaceful.   Further, half of the 3% where violence broke out were clashes with militarized police sent by university administrators to remove the otherwise peaceful student encampments. 

As we stand here on the Greenfield Common, teenage Israeli military resisters are there in Israel prisons for refusing to serve in the Israel Defense Force.  Two refusniks, before reporting to jail, wrote a letter to President Biden charging that his “unconditional support for Netanyahu’s policy of destruction has brought our [Israeli] society to the normalization of carnage and the trivialization of human lives…You are responsible for this alongside our leaders…you have the power to stop it.”

It took little more than 100 days of bombing for Israel to destroy most schools in Gaza and all 12 universities, killing students and teachers, and ending education for Gazan children and youth.  Yet only two US schools, Evergreen State College and Union Theological Seminary, and Ireland’s Trinity College have agreed to work toward divestment from “companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”

“My message for the American students,” writes Palestinian Nawar Diab, “is that…their protests and their solidarity with Palestine and Gaza gave us a glimpse of hope. And they didn’t leave us left alone.  They didn’t leave us feeling helpless.”

Her action leading to the 6-day ceasefire recalled two women whose work for peace in the United States culminated in Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May.  Prior to the Civil War, Ann Reeves Jarvis of West Virginia organized “Mothers’ Day Work Clubs” with classes for women on sanitation in food preparation and drinking water in a time of high infant and child mortality. After the war, she organized “Mothers Friendship Day,” bringing together mothers from both sides of the Civil War to support their reconciliation.

Julia Ward Howe, a passionate anti-war activist and promoter of world peace, inspired the first public “Mother’s Day for Peace” rally held in New York City on June 2, 1872. Her 1870 Mother’s Day Proclamation passionately heralded action to stop future wars:

“…Arise, all women who have hearts …

From the bosom of the devastated earth, a voice goes up with our own. It says, “Disarm, disarm!”’…

This recent Mother’s Day in Palestine, Mazin Qumsiyeh of Bethlehem University wrote “I remember my own mother who fought for peace” in the spirit of “Julia Ward Howe’s call for mothers on Mother’s day to end wars and stop sacrificing people on the altar of men’s racism, greed and egos.”

France 24 English Video: “Some 300,000 Gazans have evacuated east Rafah, Israeli army says • FRANCE 24 English

The current obliteration of Gaza is a record-breaking war on mothers and their children.

• An average of two Gazan mothers die every hour of the war leaving their families devastated and their children with diminished protection.
• After four months of Israel’s carpet bombing, more Gazan children were killed than the number of children killed in the last four years of wars around the world combined. 
• With starvation imposed on Gaza by Israel’s blockades of food aid –“unprecedented in modern history” – mothers and adult women are the ones who eat last and least.

• Many mothers are too malnourished to produce milk for their newborns; but no powdered milk in the markets and next to no clean water with which to mix it are available.
• Each day about 180 women give birth in hellish conditions, with most of Gaza’s 36 hospitals lying in rubble and their existing medical supplies nearing exhaustion. Two American trauma surgeons who have volunteered for surgical missions in crisis situations all over the world, stated recently that they have never seen cruelty like Israel’s massacre in Gaza.
• Some mothers have resorted to washing clothes and bathing their children in the sea, polluted with sewage, risking their lives under Israeli strafing.
• As of late February 2024, The U.N. estimated that some 700,000 women and girls in Gaza experience menstrual cycles but don’t have adequate access to basic hygiene products like pads, toilet paper, running water and toilets because of the war. These conditions put them at risk of reproductive and urinary tract infections.

Shahd Sataria, a human rights defender with the Palestinian Working Women Society for Development in the West Bank, visited Gaza every summer as a child until her family could no longer get a permit in 2004. “In Gaza, you got to visit the sea,” she recalled. “We are big families. We would gather at my grandma’s house, and sleep on old mattresses on the floor… those were great nights.”

She remembers the plants, the deep blue sea, nights full of stories, and a lot of singing. In the morning, the women of the family would gather around her grandmother, chatting.  Sataria couldn’t see her grandmother before she died, denied a permit to visit Gaza.

“Women have lost their chance to have education, to be in decision-making, and to be empowered.” Despite the horror of death, destruction and starvation, Sataria speaks of hope. “I believe that people in Gaza are resilient.  If the war would end today or tomorrow, I believe that they will rise up.”

This Mother’s Day my deepest desire for the surviving women of this genocidal war, is that they live to see their beloved Palestine become a member state of the UN with the resources to re-build, as Jewish women survivors of the Holocaust did with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. 

No other peoples “have been kept stateless for so many decades” as Palestinians.  But the world must be with them not just in words but in deeds.

“ Half a year of unfathomable suffering.

Half a year of irreparable trauma.

Half a year of irreplaceable loss.

Every positive change in human behavior is always preceded by an expansion of consciousness, and Gaza is expanding western consciousness like nothing ever before.”