VVAW 50th Anniversary

April 15, 1967 peace march in New York City

Half a century ago, I marched in a peace demonstration in New York City with a small group of Vietnam vets along with upwards of 400,000 protesters of the war the US was waging in Southeast Asia. The march from Central Park to the United Nations plaza was so big it jammed up streets in midtown Manhattan for much of the day. The vets group that emerged from that march is still around and commemorating its 50th anniversary on Saturday.

When:	September 16, 2017 from 2:00pm - 5:30PM
Where:	Connolly's Pub and Restaurant 121 West 45th Street New York, NY 10036
What:	50th Anniversary Event of VVAW in New York
Details:	Join VVAW as we gather to celebrate our 50th Anniversary. No elaborate events, just gathering with VVAW members and friends for talking, eating, and drinking.

As noted in the invitation from event organizers: "Veterans For Peace Executive Director Michael McPhearson will attend, and will present a plaque to VVAW. All VFP, VVAW, IVAW, About Face, MFSO, etc. members and friends are invited to attend." As noted in NYU Press' description of the best, concise history of VVAW:

The anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States is perhaps best remembered for its young, counterculture student protesters. However, the Vietnam War was the first conflict in American history in which a substantial number of military personnel actively protested the war while it was in progress.In The Turning, Andrew Hunt reclaims the history of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization that transformed the antiwar movement by placing Vietnam veterans in the forefront of the nationwide struggle to end the war. Misunderstood by both authorities and radicals alike, VVAW members were mostly young men who had served in Vietnam and returned profoundly disillusioned with the rationale for the war and with American conduct in Southeast Asia. 

Bloomberg and Green Activist Team Up on Climate Change

 Climate of Hope: How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet burst into the public arena just before Earth Day. A joint communique by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, the heavily promoted book presents a formidable counterweight to the Trump administration’s assault on climate change action and environmental protection regulations.

In a remarkable networking move, the billionaire businessman and the backpacker environmental activist present a comprehensive plan for a grassroots campaign on climate change that builds on actions already begun in cities and states across the US and around the world. Writing in alternating chapters, they make a case for local civic actions to set the pace on addressing threats to the environment.

“No matter what happens in Washington, no matter what regulations the Trump administration adopts or rescinds, no matter what laws Congress may pass, market forces, local (and in some cases state) governments, and consumer demand for cleaner air will, together, allow the United States to meet and exceed the pledges that the Obama administration made in Paris,” Bloomberg contends. “The reason is simple: cities, businesses, and citizens will continue reducing emission, because they have concluded … that doing so is in their own self-interest.”

Pope argues that “during the Progressive era at the start of the 20th century, it was cities and states that forged the new policy instruments that eventually became the New Deal, rather than waiting for Washington. Mike Bloomberg and I believe that political leadership in the United States, and elsewhere, will come from below, not from national elites, which remain in thrall to the fossil lobby and other entrenched interests.”

It’s an approach that surely appeals to Sierra Club campaigners. “As the director of the Sierra Club’s Ready for 100 campaign,” Jodie Van Horn wrote in a review on the Sierra Club website, “I am heartened that Bloomberg and Pope see the battle against global warming as one that can be effectively waged at the municipal level, irrespective of the current regressive political climate in Washington, D.C., and lack of leadership emanating from Inside the Beltway.

“Ready for 100 is asking mayors, pastors, principals, civic and community leaders, parents, and students in cities large and small to commit to solutions that will help us achieve 100% clean energy across the United States by 2050,” she continued, noting that 26 cities have already committed to the 100 percent goal, including San Diego, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City.

It’s an approach that also appeals beyond liberal enclaves such as New York and the West Coast. Matthew D'Ancona, a conservative political columnist in London, likes the networking of local government leaders on environmental issues described in this book. 

“Bloomberg has been UN special envoy for cities and climate change since 2014, and is the driving force behind the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, a coalition of 7,000 cities in 112 countries,” D’Ancona noted in a recent book review in the London Evening Standard. “Because mayors are engaged in such a specific and detailed way with the needs of their cities — and are daily accountable to their voters — they are perfectly placed between individual citizens who often feel powerless and national governments that move at a snail’s pace in their quest for global collaboration.” 

“Accordingly,” the British journalist continued, “there is much here for our own city authorities — and every newly-elected metro mayor — to learn from. It is a model text for those who argue that decentralisation works best and that most of the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century require localised solutions.”

In response to a question on WNYC Radio’s “Morning Edition” about the bitter political divide in the US on climate change, Pope pointed out that pragmatism is often more powerful than politics at the community level.

“It's a very partisan issue at the national level,” Pope said. “But if you get down to the local level and you look at which cities are choosing to embrace clean energy, it turns out the first big American city to say it was going to be a hundred percent renewable was San Diego, which has a Republican mayor. Another big city that has said it's going to go 100 percent renewable is Salt Lake City, the largest city in the reddest state in the country.”

For more information:

www.climateofhope.com/

www.sierraclub.org/planet/2017/04/climate-hope

www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/books/climate-of-hope-how-cities-businesses-and-citizens-can-save-the-planet-by-michael-bloomberg-and-carl-a3554596.html

www.npr.org/2017/04/26/525675189/michael-bloomberg-and-carl-pope-on-climate-of-hope

For a Downed Airman

(US Air Force photo)

Spring Memory

For Ted Crumb

Nov. 24, 1946-April 14, 1999

My brother rode motorcycles

like a howling wind bending

trees to his pleasure

He dove from helicopters

like an osprey into the ocean

to rescue downed pilots

When his swift cycle crashed

into a farm tractor

no one could save him

Eighteen springs ago

veteran paramedic died in a ditch

Just miles from home

--Jan Barry

Jan Barry/ Peter Neil Carroll Poetry Reading

I am honored to be doing a poetry reading with Peter Neil Carroll at Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, NJ on Friday at 7 pm. I'll be reading from a new collection of my poems, Earth Songs II, that I'm aiming to publish shortly. Peter will be reading from his new work, Truth Lies on Earth: A Year by Dark, by Bright. 

Peter teaches U.S. history at Stanford. In addition to four collections of poetry, he is the author and editor of numerous works on impacts of historical events, including From Guernica to Human Rights: Essays on the Spanish Civil War, Keeping Time: Memory, Nostalgia, and the Art of History  and The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War. He has also taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco, hosted "Booktalk" on Pacifica Radio, and edited the San Francisco Review of Books. 

Peter likes to travel around America and write poems about head-scratching things he encounters. Here’s an excerpt from “Birds of Dakota” in his collection Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land:

Old Highway 2 leads to a steel fence

far off the road. Circular tracks wait

for the mobile multi-warhead vehicles.

Otherwise only hay fields, cows, a silo,

red barn, hills reaching to the sky—

a distant train of tankers freights east.

The Bomb sleeps underground, its

brain, organs, vessels hard-wired.

A gray terminal guards the software.

The officer looks twice, head

to toe, decides to tell me the story

of a farmer pestered by blackbirds.

You see, he fired three shots

into a peach tree, a flock of helicopters

landed, soldiers asked him questions.

…..

For more information:

www.turningpointbooks.com/carroll_truth.html

https://www.facebook.com/events/1002430656556960/

Memories of My Dad

Jack Crumb 1924-2017

Remarks at memorial service for Jack Crumb, April 22, at First Baptist Church, Interlaken, NY

As many of you may know, my father didn’t much like Democrats—but he managed to tolerate his John Kerry-buddy-Al Gorish-Obama-supporting-Hillary-uggh-voting oldest son. My Dad had very strong beliefs—until confronted by confounding facts. He loved American cars—Fords, Chevvies, Hudsons, you name it, he loved tinkering with it—until he discovered Toyotas. He didn’t much like Japan, having served in World War II, but he loved Toyota’s cars.

My father was a complicated man. He didn’t attend college, but he filled our house with books. And he seemed to have read them all—plus piles of magazines, newspapers, tourist brochures, and maps. My Dad had a map for virtually every state, and every county in upstate New York—in many cases, maps going back to the 1930s, when his father was a highway engineer and state parks engineer. On one old map, Dad noted the route he and his brother Ed took in riding their bikes from Jacksonville around Seneca Lake and back home—in time for supper, if I recall the story right.

My Dad also liked to collect calendars with photos of airplanes, cars, waterfalls, covered bridges, flowers, wildlife. He also liked to collect old tools, old license plates, old bicycles, and anything else that caught his eye at a lawn sale.

From the time he was a kid, Jack loved to drive cars. In “retirement,” he drove cars for Maguire and other car dealerships—cars that needed to be taken for trade to other dealerships across New York state, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New England.

Many of us here may recall the time my Dad said “let’s go for a drive”—and, as he narrated the history of everything of interest we passed, we’d end up at Niagara Falls, or Oswego on Lake Ontario, or Harris Hill, “the soaring capital of America,” where gliders swooped over the magnificent terrain near the Pennsylvania border.

As everyone knows, my Dad loved to tell stories. No doubt, you have at least one favorite story you heard him tell.

Saving the Earth is Up to Us

Sign at Sierra Club rally in support of  environmental protection
outside EPA labs in Edison, NJ (photo/Jan Barry)

The new administration in Washington is determined to roll back environmental protection regulations and dismisses global climate change as a hoax. As a nation poisoned by industrial pollution, we’ve been there before.  But more people today have the means to learn what they can do about it. There are good models of effective civic actions all over this country.

A group of residents in a rural corner of New Jersey organized a campaign that saved a large wetland area called the Great Swamp from being paved over for a proposed airport, before there was an environmental protection agency.  A larger group of residents in towns along the New York-New Jersey border waged a campaign that saved Sterling Forest, a headwaters area for drinking water for millions of people, from being paved over to create a new city. An even larger coalition of civic groups waged a campaign that transformed the Hudson River from an industrial and municipal sewer into a much cleaner estuary.

Those are three examples I highlighted in A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigns, a book published in 2000 based on my newspaper reporting on effective civic actions. Back in the day, federal environmental protection laws such as the clean water act were enacted because of a nationwide campaign that turned out 20 million people on the first Earth Day in 1970. And that was done the old-fashioned way, before the Internet or cell phones. What is needed now is a sustained campaign to focus what people can do working together to be as meaningful as that first Earth Day event.

Recently, a statewide coalition convinced New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to ban hydraulic fracking for oil and gas to protect New York City’s water supply streams and reservoirs in the Catskills and water supply aquifers across the state. In Philadelphia, PA a citywide coalition named Green Justice Philly convinced Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf to back a plan for a greener expansion of port facilities, rather than a gas fracking company’s proposed project.

On the West Coast, San Diego, California, is implementing a plan to dramatically reduce greenhouse gasses by shifting to renewable energy.  This is a result of the work of a diverse coalition of elected officials, business leaders, labor unions, environmental, social justice and community organizations. San Diego’s Climate Action Campaign reports on its website that it is now “engaged with thirteen other municipalities in San Diego and Orange Counties to develop and pass similarly transformative plans.” 

At a Sierra Club rally outside Environmental Protection Agency labs in Edison, NJ a few days ago, commercial tractor trailer truck drivers repeatedly honked in support of signs such as “Global Warming Is Real It’s 70 Degrees in February” and “EPA is for Environmental Protection, not Corporate.”  Among the signs brandished by a vocal crowd of citizen activists was US Representative Frank Pallone and state and local elected officials. “We need to protect Americans’ fundamental right to clean air, clean water and a safe environment to raise their families,” Pallone said. “I am proud to stand with the Sierra Club and committed citizens against President Trump’s dangerous environmental policies.”  It was a scene that has flared up and fired up people for years in New Jersey, where civic campaigns have forced cleanups of toxic sites and saved large swathes of the state from destructive development.

For more information:

www.amazon.com/Citizens-Guide-Grassroots-Campaigns/dp/0813528011

www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/New_York_and_fracking

www.foodandwaterwatch.org/impact/philly-activists-take-fossil-fuel-giants-%E2%80%94-and-win

www.climateactioncampaign.org/

www.gmnews.com/2017/02/24/edison-rally/

Heart of the Finger Lakes

Taughannock Falls, Fall 2016   (photo/Jan Barry)

Communities across the scenic landscape of central New York state lay claim to being "the heart of the Finger Lakes." I grew up in one among many. Glancing through photos I snapped during a visit home last fall, my niece Melissa Baldwin Pennington discovered that my digital camera had recorded the very spot: Taughannock Falls, framed in a ❤ shaped phenomenon created by autumn leaves.