Weather Wise

Oct. 29, 2011  Teaneck, NJ  (photo/Jan Barry)

Early Warning

Winter dropped from the October sky

Two days before Halloween—

Tree branches smothered in snow

On summer leaves snapping deep into the night

Made darker by downed power lines

Global warming! skeptics scoffed—

As this part of suburban civilization

Staggered for days without electricity,

Closed schools, postponed Halloween

Until tangled wires and lives are restored

--Jan Barry

Celebrating Drew Cameron’s Healing Art

Drew Cameron

Remarks I gave at “Envisioning Tomorrow,” the Printmaking Center of New Jersey's awards dinner at the Somerville Elks Lodge, Bridgewater, NJ on November 12. The center honored Drew Cameron, the co-founder and co-director of Combat Paper, “a touring project with a compelling mission to use the healing power of art to transform the shattered lives of young veterans.”

I first encountered Drew Cameron three years ago at Rutgers University, where I was teaching a journalism class. He and several fellow Combat Papermakers were conducting workshops at the Brodsky Center in New Brunswick, turning military uniforms into posters and chapbooks of art and poetry, culminating in a jam-packed poetry reading. I went to the first workshop intending to spend a day—and ended up returning all week, intrigued by the interaction of vets, students, art instructors and passersby.

Though my intention was to observe and write about this fascinating project, I was pulled into the middle of it by Drew’s infectious invitation to join in. Presented the opportunity to cut up a desert warfare uniform, I found it very satisfying to disassemble an official symbol of military might. I wished I still had one of my Vietnam uniforms to slice up!

Many veterans have returned from war so angry, disillusioned, disgusted that they threw their uniforms away. After serving in Iraq, Drew decided to slice his war uniform off while filming his defiant act of performance art and turning the startling images into postcards and posters. This angry artwork was hand-printed on paper made of rag pulp from the shredded uniform. The genius of this idea to physically transform a war uniform into primary elements of papermaking art is that it is cathartic, as well as creative.

Through Drew’s networking and prodigious traveling, Combat Paper workshops and their thought-provoking art have appeared at scores of colleges and arts institutions across the USA and overseas. He has planted seeds of this cathartic art in many places and woven a new social fabric linking many war-torn hearts. As Drew notes on the Combat Paper web site: “From each new participant, I take a piece of fabric and mix it into the lineage pulp. This pulp is then mixed in with each new batch of pulp, so a little piece of each vet’s uniform is in every new piece of paper made.”

 

Another participant in the Rutgers workshops who also was deeply touched by the experience that Drew offers vets is Eli Wright. Eli has followed Drew’s path by serving as Co-Director of the Printmaking Center’s Combat Paper Program. As Eli said three years ago: “We’re all going through many changes in this project… I was a medic. I enlisted in the military to save lives, not take them. … This project saves lives, it gives us direction—to find we can build bridges and tear down those walls and remake sense of our lives.”

What an arts project—to inspire war veterans to live more creatively. Last year, I dropped by a Combat Paper workshop at the Printmaking Center and ended up hand-making, hand-printing and hand-stitching a chapbook of new poems I wrote, that were inspired by conversations with Drew and other Combat Papermakers. Last winter, I traveled to Buffalo, NY in a snowstorm to work with Drew on a poster for an arts event I was organizing. Here’s the result—a poster designed by Drew that highlights key words in my “Costs of War” poem by using an amazing woodcut design printed on recycled military uniforms.

For such hands-on, hands-down creative work that has inspired so many people through art, I’m honored to present Drew Cameron with PCNJ’s Erena Rae Award in Art and Social Justice!    

For more information:

Combat Paper.org
http://odysseus.nervegarden.com/2009/04/10/drew-cameron-combat-paper-project/

Saving America

Harvard law prof''s message

Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party have a lot in common, not least of which is an historic mission to save the America that every public school class, politician and public officeholder pledges allegiance to. That’s the message that Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is taking around the country in lectures, blogs and a new book titled Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It.

Lessig is a former Reagan Republican and Obama Democrat whose latest foray into the political sphere has been hailed as “the manifesto of the Occupy Wall Street movement.” That is how he was introduced recently to a large audience at Ramapo College of New Jersey that crowded into an evening lecture swollen with students at the state college in Mahwah, NJ and senior citizens from surrounding suburban communities.

These days in the United States created by our revered Founding Fathers such as Jefferson and Franklin, our “government is an embarrassment to most of us,” Lessig thundered, undeterred by a faulty sound system. “This is not an issue of Left or Right,” he added, noting that nearly 90 percent of the American people have lost confidence in Congress, according to a recent Gallup Poll.  

In a Huffington Post blog posted a few days earlier, Lessig summarized his on-the-road lecture in three concise points: 

“For there is a common ground between the anger of the Left and the anger of the Right: That common ground is a political system that does not work. A government that is not responsive, or -- in the words of the Framers, the favorite source of insight for our brothers on the Right -- a government that is not, as Federalist 52 puts it, ‘dependent upon the People alone.’

“Because this government is not dependent upon ‘the People alone.’ This government is dependent upon the Funders of campaigns. 1% of America funds almost 99% of the cost of political campaigns in America. Is it therefore any surprise that the government is responsive first to the needs of that 1%, and not to the 99%?

“This government, we must chant, is corrupt. We can say that clearly and loudly from the Left. They can say that clearly and loudly from the Right. And we then must teach America that this corruption is the core problem -- it is the root problem -- that we as Americans must be fighting.”

In his campus lecture in New Jersey, Lessig drew a big round of applause when he said: “Revolutions happen in waves. The first wave was the 2008 election of Obama [who eloquently addressed this problem as a candidate]. Wave two was the Tea Party movement. The third crest is the Occupy Wall Street movement. My view is that each of these waves is linked. Each of these waves is driven by the grassroots.”

In his book, Lessig cites numerous studies showing the massive flows of corporate money cascading into congressional election campaigns and fielding armies of lobbyists flooding the halls, hearing rooms and offices of Congress in recent years. This money was used to buy votes or influence to tilt government policies and actions to financially favor the funders’ economic interests, he argues.

“My sense is that too many on the Right make the same mistake as many on the Left. They assume that change happens when you win enough votes in Congress,” he wrote. Not so, he argues, because “the current system of campaign funding radically benefits the status quo—the status quo for private interests and the status quo of the Fund-raising Congress.” That’s why both Republicans and Democrats in Congress voted to bail out Wall Street banks whose unregulated gambling spree drove the national economy over a cliff, he argues. And now both Obama and his Republican presidential opponents are trolling for mega-buck Wall Street donations to their campaigns.

Lessig’s proposed solution is to marshal a movement of “nonpolitician candidates” in both Democratic and Republican primaries to challenge congressional incumbents, support a new crop of reform presidential candidates, and mount a grassroots campaign for a constitutional convention with a mandate to limit the amount of money anyone can contribute to a candidate for Congress.

“I’m not sure that any of these strategies would work,” Lessig told Rolling Stone in a recent interview, “but if there is one that will work, it will have to be on different territory than the one lobbyists and members of congress now control. I think that the real challenge is we’re not used to exercising power as citizens anymore. We’ve been passive listeners to television commercials for too long, and not really active producers of democracy.”

To help spur civic activism on this issue, Lessig co-founded a nonprofit organization called Fix Congress First, which promotes an activist project call Rootstrikers that does outreach via a website, facebook and twitter.

For more information:

http://www.rootstrikers.org

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-lessig/a-letter-to-the-occupiers_b_1007459.html

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/lawrence-lessig-on-how-money-corrupts-congress-and-how-to-stop-it-20111005#ixzz1clcPkM60

The War at Home

Scott Olsen (photo/AP)

In Boston, Massachusetts and Oakland, California, Veterans For Peace members have been assaulted by police while peacefully demonstrating on behalf of Occupy Wall Street protest groups’ constitutional rights.

The most seriously injured is Scott Olsen, a Marine vet of two tours in Iraq, who was hospitalized with head injuries after police in Oakland fired tear-gas canisters and other projectiles into an Occupy Oakland crowd assembled in front of City Hall. Olsen was wearing a Veterans For Peace T-shirt and desert camouflage field jacket and hat when he was struck in the forehead. He is also a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

“It was like a war zone,” Joshua Shepherd, a fellow vet who was standing near Olsen while dressed in his Navy uniform and holding aloft a highly visible, white Veterans For Peace flag, told The Associated Press. “Shepherd said it’s a cruel irony that Olsen is fighting for his life in the country that he fought to protect. ‘He was over there protecting the rights and freedoms of America and he comes home, exercises his freedoms and it’s here where he’s nearly fatally wounded,’ Shepherd said.”

In Boston, police knocked down, clubbed and tore Veterans For Peace and an American flag from the hands of a group of peace activist vets standing between the police assault and an Occupy Boston encampment the authorities set out to destroy. Among those dragged off to a paddy wagon was Rachel McNeil, an Army vet who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom and was holding an American flag. Her crime: “Rachel loudly and continuously led a chant of the Oath (I do solemly swear to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic); but she alternated it with ‘We have a permit.  It's called the Constitution’ and also ‘This is a peaceful demonstration,”" a fellow Vets For Peace member noted.

Rachel McNeil (right) and fellow VFP members

“VFP members are involved with dozens of these local ‘occupy movement’ encampments and we support them fully,” VFP national officers stated.  “In Boston, for example, our members, wearing VFP shirts and carrying VFP flags, stood between a line of police and the encampment, urging police to ‘join the 99%’ and not evict the protesters.  In that case, several of our members were banged and bruised when the police decided instead to carry out their eviction orders…

“As with virtually every example of the occupy movement across the country, those encamped were conducting themselves peacefully beforehand, protesting current economic, social and environmental conditions in the U.S. brought about by decades of corporate control, a criminal financial industry and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are driving the U.S. global empire into bankruptcy.  These ‘occupy movement’ participants are telling us something we need very desperately to hear.  They should be listened to, not arrested and brutalized.

“Police in the majority of cities are acting with restraint and humanity towards the encampments, but Veterans For Peace will not be deterred by police who choose to use brutal tactics.  In fact, as happens with repression everywhere, more people join the cause.”    

Indeed, as The New York Times reported today, “the wounding of an Iraq war veteran … has provided a powerful central rallying point.” Thousands of people streamed into downtown Oakland the next day for a peaceful gathering on behalf of the Occupy Oakland movement. The mayor of Oakland commended the movement’s goals. The police promised an investigation into what caused Olsen’s injuries. News reports and videos taken at the time show what happened.

“ Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq, stood calmly in front of a police line as tear gas canisters that officers shot into the Occupy Oakland protest Tuesday night whizzed past his head,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported today.

"’He was standing perfectly still, provoking no one,’ said Raleigh Latham, an Oakland filmmaker shooting footage of the confrontation between police and hundreds of protesters at 14th Street and Broadway. ‘If something didn't hit him directly in the face, then it went off close to his head and knocked him down.’ The something was a projectile that apparently came from police lines, fractured Olsen's skull and put him in Highland General Hospital. Doctors upgraded his condition Thursday from critical to fair, and said they expect him to make a full recovery.”

Like many members of Vets For Peace, Scott Olsen felt it was important to demonstrate the peaceful presence of military veterans at the Occupy Wall Street encampments that have sprung up around the country. As The Associated Press noted in a report carried by Business Week and news publications nationwide, Olsen “makes a good living as a network engineer and has a nice hillside apartment overlooking San Francisco Bay. And yet, his friends say, he felt so strongly about economic inequality in the country that he fought for that he slept at a San Francisco protest camp after work.

"’He felt you shouldn't wait until something is affecting you to get out and do something about it,’ said friend and roommate Keith Shannon, who served with Olsen in Iraq.”

For more information:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/28/MND61LN3LM.DTL

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9QKTHS82.htm

http://www.veteransforpeace.org/news_detail.php?idx=123

From Making War to Book Making

Tearing a leaf from Edgar Allan Poe’s literary leave from the US Army, a similarly brash band of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans called Warrior Writers is raising money from friends, family and fellow vets to publish a collection of their own poetry, prose and art drawn from military experience.  

Poe parted company with the US Military Academy at West Point in 1831 and published a collection of his poetry with funds provided by fellow cadets. A new crop of soldiers-turned-poets, writers and artists is currently seeking assistance to raise sufficient funds by Veterans Day to publish a new anthology compiled by the Warrior Writers Project. Their goal is to publish this eclectic collection of works by more than 60 veterans in December, just in time to celebrate the official winding down of US military operations in Iraq.

Having seen much of the work in this book-in-progress as an advisor to this project, it very much reminds me of the astounding and still memorable voices and images that emerged from Winning Hearts & Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans and Demilitarized Zones: Veterans after Vietnam, which were published in a similar do-it-ourselves fashion in 1972 and 1976, thanks to many friends who contributed funds and helped sell copies across the country. 

"Through our writing and art workshops, veterans are able to share their military experiences, receive support from other veterans and connect with their community,” notes the Warrior Writers group of this hands-on project by young men and women who aid each other in creatively forging new lives in the wake of military service in the current controversial wars, which they have much to say about.

Would you shed one drop of blood

   for the gallons that we've given,

would you last one day in the conditions

   we've spent years in?

Ray Camper, an Army National Guard veteran of Iraq from Minneapolis, MN, asks in a poem titled “Letter to the War Presidents.”

I wrote this in a hurry in a machine gun turret several nights later.

Try to burn it out of memory by putting it on paper…

Zachariah Dean, a Marine veteran of Afghanistan, writes in a poem titled “Happy Birthday,” about suddenly realizing he just turned 26 as death whizzes by in the middle of a firefight in which his rifle is jammed by a defective bullet.

Many of the contributors are active in Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans For Peace and other protest groups including Occupy Wall Street and offshoot demonstrations across America. Like Walt Whitman, the exuberant song-of-myself poet who was shaken by the carnage he saw in the American Civil War, they convey often blunt public messages tied to their personal stories of surviving the senselessness of modern war, seeking to stir or embrace movements for social change. Here’s how Maggie Martin, a former Army sergeant who served two tours in Iraq, put it in a poem entitled “Brio”:   

I have engaged the power of spring,

buzzing with life-force, ignorant of drought or death,

resilient as meadow grass and morning.

I sow community in re-acquisitioned places,

crowded city street, marching orders, protest song,

unsinkable strength, our hands and mouths.

I have heard the rumble of feet on ground,

drum-beat depth, commencement of the connected,

roll on, advancing steady, through cities hungry,

stirring a hum in open heads and hearts.

Old constructs crumble and blow away,

new consciousness takes root.

Warrior Writers produced two previous anthologies: Re-Making Sense (2008) and Move, Shoot and Communicate, a chapbook published in 2007. Much of the poetry and prose pieces in all three collections were developed in workshops and weekend retreats led by Lovella Calica, the group’s director, who organized book production crews to compile each anthology. Other work, including artwork, was solicited via a Facebook page, the Philadelphia-based group’s website and other outreach.

For further information about the forthcoming anthology, visit www.warriorwriters.org and click on the hot link for the Kickstarter contributions page. A copy of the new anthology can be pre-ordered with a $40 contribution.

Protest at Wall Street

Ken Dalton (center) holds VFP banner at Wall St. protest

A contingent of Veterans For Peace and Military Families Speak Out members from New Jersey joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in New York City on Saturday, October 8.

Many in the crowd of young people, older folks who dusted off memories of the protests of the '60s and '70s, and photo-snapping tourists seemed delighted to see the VFP banner unfurled near a corner of Liberty Plaza facing the new office towers being constructed at the site of the former World Trade Center. Among the Jersey contingent was VFP Chapter 21 President Ken Dalton, a Navy vet of the Vietnam war, who worked as a fire fighter in search and rescue operations at Ground Zero in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attack.

A common question of vets by news reporters who stopped by for a comment was “What do war and Wall Street have in common?” Duh. Millions of unemployed veterans and other folks caught in the web of trillion-dollar wars and an economic collapse that the federal bailout of Wall Street banks was supposed to fix could have told them in a New York minute.

Many of the demonstrators in New York on Saturday eloquently stated the reasons for their dismay in an array of hand-made signs, some of which are shown here.

(Photos by Jan Barry)

Saving Grace

Lake at Arrow Park, NY

Saving a corner of the Earth in its natural state is increasingly hard work. It takes many hands and, often, many organizations. So it was that, the other day, an eclectic crowd of people gathered beside a forest-fringed lake about 38 miles northwest of New York City, to celebrate the latest conservation success story.

For reasons related to recent and legendary events in American history, survivors of the New York City Fire Department’s staggering losses at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, stood besides Native Americans who brought a 20-foot-tall healing totem pole that was carved in Washington State. Leaders of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference in nearby Mahwah, NJ, stood with current and former New York state conservation officials, local municipal officials and private landowners in this remote corner of the Hudson Highlands in Monroe, NY.    

To the beat of a Native American drum, the gathering of about 100 people celebrated the conservation buyout of nearly 260 acres purchased from the privately-owned Arrow Park, to be added to adjacent Sterling Forest State Park, which is part of the Palisades Interstate Park system. The conservation deal was brokered by the Orange County Land Trust with $5.3 million from the State of New York Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

“These projects would never happen without so many people,” said Paul Dolan, executive director of ABC News International and a conservation advocate for the NY-NJ Trail Conference, as a big swath of the audience was called forward to be lauded for their assistance. Dolan and his wife JoAnn, a former executive director of the hiking trails group, previously helped lead a bi-state campaign that preserved some 20,000 acres of open space that became Sterling Forest State Park. Developers had targeted the area with plans to build a sprawling city of housing and industry in the mountain forests that form the headwaters of northern New Jersey’s water supply.

Arrow Park was created in 1948 as a country retreat for a group of Russian, Ukrainian and Polish families living in New York City. Such large tracts of land in the region have increasingly been sold off or subdivided for housing developments.

The gathering at Arrow Park also celebrated the visit of a troupe of American Indians who’d previously  traveled across the country in 2002 to erect a healing totem pole besides the lake in the heart of the park to commemorate the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Now they were passing through with a new healing totem headed for the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.

“I was thinking back to nine years ago when we came to this very spot,” said Fred Lane, a filmmaker with the Lummi Indian Nation, which provided both healing totems. “We have to remember our ancestors, our elders. I remember something my father said, ‘What are you going to do to be remembered by?’”

Master carver Jewell James played a song on a wooden flute. “No matter who we are racially or religiously, we are all human beings,” he said. In 2002, James was profiled in a USA Today article on the making of the healing totem for 9/11 victims. He recalled how his tribe had helped him deal with grief when two of his children were killed in traffic accidents. So he decided to help others by carving healing totems. "You never know how much it might help," he said. "This is my gift."

The Orange County Land Trust’s website provides a poignant perspective on what happened in the wake of that gift that the Pacific Coast tribe brought east to Arrow Park. “Recently, the Fire Department of New York’s Counseling Service Unit presented the Orange County Land Trust with an award for leading this successful 10-year campaign to protect Arrow’s land which includes an 80 acre FDNY memorial planting tract. Since 2002, the families of firefighters who lost their lives in the line of duty on 9/11 gather at Arrow Park for a tree planting ceremony and day of remembrance.”

In his remarks at last week’s ceremony, Paul Dolan said “Our goal is that this be a place for all different groups to heal.” 

The Orange County Land Trust website explains the genesis of that goal:  “A remaining parcel of 75 plus acres [which includes a rustic complex of buildings] is under active study as a center for programs for children and families by a consortium of non profit sponsors. Currently Calvary Hospital runs a summer camp on this land for children who have experienced the death of a family member. This bereavement program has served over 400 children since it was started 11 years ago.

“Arrow has been the site of recent professional training programs for Orange County organizations working with veterans and their families. Prior programs and events have focused on children of war from Sierra Leone and recreational programs for children with special needs.”

For more information:

http://www.oclt.org/pr-01292009.htm

http://nlmtotem.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/guest-blog-arrow-park-n-y-blessing/

http://www.arrowparkny.com/Articles/LummiHealingPole/LummiTotem_USATODAY.html