Welcome Home

Eli Painted Crow and fellow vets in "The Welcome"

Bob and Moe Eaton’s marriage, shadowed for more than 30 years by nightmares from the war in Vietnam, was about to implode. Ken Kraft, an Army officer who proudly served in Iraq, felt betrayed by his son’s refusal to carry on the family tradition of military service. Eli Painted Crow, a former Army drill sergeant, felt betrayed by the nation that sent her to war on dark-skinned, tribal people like herself.

These were just some of the rubbed-raw emotions that a couple dozen war veterans and several family members brought to an unusual retreat in Oregon. In this deceptively quiet setting, a film crew recorded real life dramas brimming with outbursts of bitterness and laughter, tears and hugs, dark humor and dawning revelations. The focus of the four-day gathering, just before Memorial Day 2008, was to sort out what they wanted to say—in a poem or a song or a concise statement—to a crowd of people preparing a public event to welcome these warriors home from war.

“I’m asking you to f------ listen!” Eli Painted Crow shouted at the other participants in a particularly tense point in the new documentary called “The Welcome.” A retired Army sergeant and Native American peace activist, Painted Crow was fed up with interruptions as she attempted to explain how she felt about her deployment in Iraq, where fellow soldiers called combat areas Indian country. “I just want to be heard with your hearts,” she added, before stomping out the door to cool off. “If you don’t hear me with your hearts, I can’t heal.”

In another scene, a member of Veterans For Peace said he felt like the enemy in Vietnam. Another Vietnam vet retorted that he wasn’t the enemy but killed people who were the enemy. That set off a whirlwind of war justifications by other veterans.

Such scenes pull viewers intimately into the inner turmoil of the aftermath of war that swirls through many veterans across America. Throughout the 93-minute film directed by Kim Shelton, veterans and family members openly struggle to tame the turmoil long enough to find some pathway to healing.

“Sometimes you stumble into something out of a sense of duty or good intentions only to find yourself absorbed and overwhelmed beyond anything you might have anticipated,” a reviewer for The Oregonian, Shawn Levy, wrote of this low-budget film that was an audience hit at the Ashland (Oregon) Independent Film Festival this spring.

“From virtually the outset, with a poem by Laura Carpenter, a veteran of Afghanistan about to deploy to Iraq, ‘The Welcome’ drills directly through any emotional reserves you might bring into it,” Levy added. “You're unsteadied, startled, galvanized, and brought to sobs again and again.  There are dark jokes and harrowing accounts of the hellish confusion of war and its grip on the memory.  There are angry outbursts as the various veterans try to establish terms of respect and conduct with one another.  There are wry laughs and monumental silences.  And there are staggering moments of courage in which the veterans look as if they're merely speaking aloud but in which they are actually performing open-heart surgery on themselves -- in front of an audience and a movie camera.”

Amazingly, the participants ignored the camera as they candidly interacted with each other and with retreat leader Michael Meade, described by the filmmakers as a “mythologist and story teller who specialized in working with traumatized communities.” Meade’s ritualistic mixture of Native American chants and Irish stories grated on Eli Painted Crow and another Native American woman veteran. But after an outburst about respecting traditions, they participated on their terms.

“One of the ways to heal is to find out what our gifts are and begin practicing giving them,” Meade said, in guiding the group to write poetry, which he defined as “the speech of the soul,” in preparation for a Memorial Day event at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.

Retired Army Captain Ken Kraft wrestled with how to make sense of a phone call he’d gotten in Iraq that his son had deserted from Army ranger training and denounced the war. He felt betrayed, he said, and bolted from the podium back to his seat. At the Memorial Day event, Kraft praised the intense interaction at the retreat and read a poem about his pride in being a soldier and noted that he was trying to reach out to his son.

A young woman veteran shyly read a poem about the shame of a sexual assault by a military superior. Another young woman vet read a poem about older veterans reaching out and clearing a path for them.

Cynthia Lefever, whose son was severely wounded in Iraq, read a poem about a dream in which rows of wounded soldiers marched down a road toward her, beseeching: “Be our mom—for God’s sake, bring us home!”

“I found a voice I didn’t know I had,” Mandy Martin, another of the retreat participants, said in a recent PBS television interview. "The impact has been pretty immense," she said of the veterans' healing project. A follow up on the film website notes that she now works at the Department of Veterans Affairs as a congressional communications officer.

Moe Eaton, whose husband Bob served in Vietnam, read a poem about his frightening mood swings and suicidal statements. “Me: Why can’t you count your blessings? He: I don’t know.”

Bob Eaton then haltingly told a story, which he said he’d never been able to tell his wife, about surviving a battle in Vietnam and having to shovel up the remains of dead soldiers blown apart by artillery explosions. “I thought every f------ night that that was going to happen again,” he added.

At the Memorial Day event, Bob Eaton pulled out a guitar, stared at the packed auditorium full of neighbors, friends and strangers and brought down the house with applause when he growled “I was heavily medicated for depression. I wanted to get off the medication and took up the guitar. You’re the first audience I’ve ever played for.”

“You’re coming home/ Feeling all alone/ Thousand-yard stare/ Nobody there,” he sang and then stopped, nearly breaking down. The audience clapped again encouragingly. “When will it end?/ The guilt and the shame/ Now it’s back again,” he continued.  “That old war/ It still haunts me.”

In a recent PBS television interview about the film, Moe Eaton said the couple’s participation in the veterans’ retreat “had a lot to do with saving our marriage.” She realized, she said, that Bob’s war nightmares wouldn’t go away by continuing to say “get over it.”

For Bob Eaton, playing a song he wrote at the Memorial Day “Welcome Home” event launched a new career singing at veterans’ gatherings. “It gave me the courage to keep going,” he said.

The documentary was made by Kim Shelton and her husband, Bill McMillan, who are both therapists in Ashland, Oregon. They created the Welcome Home Project to provide resource materials for communities interested in holding similar events and are seeking film festivals and organizations that would be interested in hosting showings of the film.

For more information:
http://www.thewelcomehomeproject.org/
http://www.thewelcomethemovie.com/
http://blog.oregonlive.com/madaboutmovies/2011/04/ashland_independent_film_festi_1.html

Poetry and Cannons

Governors Island, NYC

The last time cannons were fired in battle at Governors Island in New York harbor was in 1776. After a long run as an Army and then Coast Guard headquarters, the ancient forts and cannon, 19^th century officers quarters and rows of barracks were given over a few years ago to New York to add to its tourist attractions. It’s been a long time since this tranquil setting has been disturbed by the upheavals of war. So it was that a highly emotional raising of voices amid the old battlements on Governors Island recently was from participants at the First Annual New York Poetry Festival.

One of the delights of demilitarization is enjoying the creative reuses of former military installations. An arts center run by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council occupies a former munitions warehouse near the ferry dock. The roadways for munitions trucks and ranks of marching troops are now bicycle paths. Bugle calls have been replaced by music concerts. Cannon mounts are overshadowed by whimsical sculptures.

The tree-lined lawn in front of the Victorian-era houses along Colonels Row made an inviting setting for a poetry festival. The balmy summer day induced poetry lovers to sprawl on the grass, many settled in with food and drinks on picnic blankets. Billed as an eclectic gathering of diverse poetry groups, organized by the Poetry Society of New York, the festival presented three outdoors stages with simultaneous readings by poets with a wide variety of styles and topics, including the Nuyorican Slam All Stars, the Poetry Whores, the Mom Egg, Bowery Poetry Club and Warrior Writers.

Sean Casey, an Army captain who served in Iraq, kicked off the Warrior Writers reading to a relaxed but attentive audience with a poem tracing the swirling emotions of a soldier at the end of a second deployment in a war zone.

Two weeks to go, anticipation
Trained my replacement, he’s taking over, relief
Holding the release paper in hand, freedom
Boarding a plane for the final leg of this journey, warmth
Emerging from the gate, tension
Crowds applauding, embarrassment
Greeted by family, blank
Embraced by a loving girlfriend, empty
Reunited with all that was longed for, NUMB

At a previous reading of this poem at the Bowery Poetry Club, recorded on video by filmmaker Sara Nesson, Casey noted that this experience was set in motion by being called back to active duty after serving in Iraq and ordered to do another combat tour.

Noting how emotionally draining it was to read poetry in public, Eli Wright, a former Army medic in Iraq, presented a poem revealing a kaleidoscope of colors in ominous swirls that tracked his moods as a soldier and war veteran.

In a more chipper mood, Nicole Goodman, who also served in the Army in Iraq, introduced her set by saying, “Poetry is liberating. It’s good for your soul.” But the three poems she read were anything but upbeat. Here’s an example of the dark-night-of-the-soul mood she explored:

I am not a soldier today.
This desert wide and thick
has swallowed all of my courage up.
And so I let the sun bleed into my skin again,
All I sweat is reckless disregard.
I stopped wondering if I am to survive,
For I have died by living each day…

On the upside, Nicole Goodman is studying creative writing at the City University of New York after a rough patch after coming back from the war in which she and her young daughter ended up homeless. A profile of her in the New York Times—conveying her stark outcry that many soldiers don’t find home front support when they leave military service—brought an outpouring of assistance that helped get her back on her feet.

Another reader with the veterans’ poetry group was a woman who was in the Marines, whose name I didn’t get, who participated in a writing workshop at New York University. A fellow veteran from that program showed up, delayed by a long subway ride from the Bronx to the Battery to catch the ferry, just after the Warrior Writers session ended and another group took the stage. Yet he seemed happy just to breath in the atmosphere of a poetry festival on Governors Island.

And so was I. The last time I visited Governors Island, it was a closed Coast Guard base that occasionally hosted an open house for the public to visit. I remember feeling I’d been transported, via a short ferry ride, from frenetic Manhattan streets to a delightfully timeless New England fishing village. It was rejuvenating to return, with the military trappings relegated to history, and read poetry in such a setting.

Art seems like such a fragile reed to lean on. Yet the city of New York is relying on artists to create the beguiling sort of attraction on Governors Island that turned Greenwich Village, the East Village, SoHo and many other once rundown sections of the city into popular places to live as well as travel to, to hang out, spend some memorable recreational time and money.

Art and poetry can help people rebuild their lives, as well. That was why several war veterans were drawn to a poetry festival at a former military base on a sunny Saturday this summer.

For more information:
http://govisland.com/html/home/home.shtml
http://vimeo.com/27263873

Uncle Sam’s Dioxin Cover-Up

Ford dump site in Ringwood, NJ (photo/Jan Barry)

Vietnam and New Jersey, despite the vast distance between them, share a deadly link. Both places, lushly beautiful this time of year, were poisoned by United States government actions regarding one of the most toxic chemicals, dioxin.

In Vietnam, dioxin was widely spread as a contaminant in forest-killing Agent Orange herbicides that the US government failed to warn Vietnamese and American soldiers could be deadly to their health. In New Jersey, where Agent Orange was manufactured at a Newark chemical plant and the herbicides were sprayed along power lines and elsewhere for years, the feds failed to warn Americans at home that their health could be endangered by exposure to a widespread substance in our daily environment.

A new documentary, Mann v. Ford, that opened on HBO television channels this week highlights the painful reality for a Garden State community that was poisoned despite government assurances that safety measures were in place to protect people's health from industrial pollution. In a stunningly symbolic scene, two leaders of the contaminated neighborhood walk along a path beside the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington on their way to the Capitol Building, their reflected figures weaving in and out among the long columns of names of soldiers who died in the war.

The film focuses on a lawsuit by residents of Ringwood, NJ who sued Ford Motor Company over cancer and other illnesses that beset many of their families after lead-based paint sludge and other industrial waste from a car-assembly plant was dumped near their homes. The dumping occurred in 1967-71, during the height of the war in Vietnam. Like soldiers in Vietnam, residents of the former iron mining community where the dumping occurred were long in the dark as to the hidden dangers of dioxin and other toxic substances.

Besides lead, arsenic, benzene, PCBs and other hazardous chemicals that EPA has determined were found in the Ringwood dump site area, the film shows environmental investigators for the residents’ lawyers testing for and finding dioxin in some homes and in the blood of some of the residents decades after the dumping occurred. Much is made by the attorneys how this can prove that residents were exposed to plumes of dioxin-laden air pollution when dump sites burned for weeks, spewing acrid smoke through the mountainside community.

Discussing why the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry hadn’t tested the Ringwood community for dioxin during initial investigations into potential health effects of the hazardous waste dumping, an environmental investigator says in the film: “There was a document that says you don’t have to sample for dioxin. That was about 1986 or ’87.”

This information about what wasn’t done properly and what was later found was never presented in court. The lawsuit against Ford was settled out-of-court, at the apparent direction of a state judge, shown in the film setting insurmountable requirements for presenting the health problems of more than 600 Ringwood residents and former residents.

It was not the first time the judicial system sidestepped holding an accounting of the government’s role in failing to protect the public from dioxin and other hazardous chemicals. A mass action lawsuit by Vietnam veterans in the 1980s against chemical companies that made Agent Orange for the US military was also settled out of court, under the direction of a federal judge.

Like the Ringwood residents, the Vietnam vets wanted to present evidence they and their lawyers had gathered. Instead, they were offered a few thousand dollars each to drop legal actions and go away. So the lid on health information the veterans sought to put on the record was lifted, not by lawyers or government actions, but by an angry high-ranking veteran.

Unraveling an Official Cover-Up

“Elmo R. Zumwalt 3d, son of the admiral who ordered the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and who was exposed to the defoliant himself, died of cancer today at his home. He was 42 years old,” The New York Times reported in August 1988. “In an article published in The New York Times Magazine on Aug. 24, 1986,” the obituary added, “the younger Mr. Zumwalt said: 'I am a lawyer and I don't think I could prove in court, by the weight of the existing scientific evidence, that Agent Orange is the cause of all the medical problems - nervous disorders, cancer and skin problems - reported by Vietnam veterans, or of their children's severe birth defects. But I am convinced that it is.’”

Stunned by his son’s death, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr. investigated the available studies and concluded, in a comprehensive 1990 report to the Department of Veterans Affairs, that there actually was sufficient scientific evidence to link various cancers and birth defects with dioxin. But, he found, this information had been deliberately concealed by federal officials.

“Unfortunately, political interference in government sponsored studies associated with Agent orange has been the norm, not the exception. In fact, there appears to have been a systematic effort to suppress critical data or alter results to meet preconceived notions of what alleged scientific studies were meant to find,” Zumwalt stated, citing examples of various agencies manipulating data and suppressing information about health effects of dioxin exposure.

“The flawed scientific studies and manipulated conclusions are not only unduly denying justice to Vietnam veterans suffering from exposure to Agent Orange," Zumwalt said in a quote circulated in a US Veterans Dispatch report in November 1990. "They are now standing in the way of a full disclosure to the American people of the likely health effects of exposure to toxic dioxins."

Years before Zumwalt’s scathing report, skeptical officials in New Jersey created an Agent Orange study commission in the early 1980s which found that—contrary to federal government assertions—dioxin could be found in Vietnam veterans’ bodies years after the war. As reports of long-suppressed health studies about dioxin exposure piled up, Congress in the early 1990s mandated that the VA treat or pay compensation to Vietnam veterans for a number of cancers, other illnesses, and their children with spina bifida. The list of illnesses associated with dioxin exposure has since grown substantially, and includes many if not most of the illnesses that beset the Ringwood neighborhood nearly surrounded by Ford dump sites.

Another Smoking Gun

During the time that the younger Zumwalt was frustrated that “existing scientific evidence” wasn’t sufficient to prove in court what he knew had poisoned him in Vietnam, a group of federal officials was busy trying to cover up an environmental bombshell.

“In August 1987, [a} report, entitled ‘No Margin of Safety’ and published by Greenpeace, burst like a bomb on the pulp and paper industry and its regulators within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Evidence gleamed from thousands of pages of the EPA's own documents demonstrated that pulp mills were spewing dioxins into the air and water, creating … a public health emergency,” noted an article published in Greenpeace magazine in 1989.

“But that was only the beginning. Someone inside the American Paper Institute (API), the paper manufacturer's trade organization, saw the report and sent a collection of documents to Greenpeace. These documents substantiated [activists’] charges that senior EPA officials and the industries the agency was supposed to regulate were working together to limit public knowledge about the hazards of dioxin and a host of other dangerous chemicals. According to US District Judge Owen M. Panner, the documents revealed an agreement ‘between the EPA and the industry to suppress, modify or delay the results of the joint EPA/industry [dioxin] study or the manner in which they are publicly presented.’"

Twenty years later, an attorney for the Ringwood residents said in frustration in the documentary that it would be very difficult to prove that Ford was primarily responsible for the residents’ health problems. That may well be true. The US government was supposed to have been in charge of enforcing environmental protection laws, not outsourcing enforcement to industrial polluters. Yet, as the Greenpeace article warned, by the late 1980s it was becoming apparent from various health reports the EPA was sitting on that potentially dangerous levels of dioxin were being found in fish downstream from paper mills and in paper towels, coffee filters and baby diapers, among other common household products made with bleached wood pulp.

Other ways that dioxin can get into the environment, Greenpeace reported in 1989, include: “Municipal incinerators, for example, produce dioxins when they burn garbage containing chlorinated plastics like polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Dioxins are also unwanted by-products in the manufacture of chlorinated chemicals, such as Agent Orange and the wood preservative pentachlorophenol (PCP).”

The missing element in the Ringwood pollution story—which has toxic dumping counterparts in communities across America—is a Congressional hearing where facts are presented under oath. As details about EPA’s lax oversight of Ford’s handling of its hazardous waste cleanup responsibilities in Ringwood appeared in news articles in 2005, New Jersey’s Environmental Protection Commissioner requested a criminal investigation. It never happened. Why not?

Another, vital missing element is for a knowledgeable insider to come forth and, like Admiral Zumwalt did on Agent Orange, bang some bureaucratic heads together until they get the job of protecting the public from dioxin and other toxic substances and helping the injured done right.


For more information:
http://www.gulfwarvets.com/ao.html
http://www.planetwaves.net/contents/white_wash_dioxin_cover_up.html
http://www.northjersey.com/arts_entertainment/125703938_Ramapoughs__fight_against_Ford_detailed.html


Jan Barry is featured in Mann v. Ford as a lead reporter for the Toxic Legacy series published by The Record (Bergen Co., NJ) that revealed the extent of industrial contamination and health problems in this case.

Toxic Trails

HBO flyer

Residents of a once-isolated mountain community in Ringwood, NJ have a bone-chilling tale to tell the rest of America. And HBO is offering its cable television services to help convey this story via a new documentary called Mann v. Ford.

Highlighting the community’s fight against a plague of illness and deaths they worry were caused by toxic waste dumped in the forest and abandoned iron mines around their homes, the film “follows members of New Jersey’s Ramapough Mountain Indian tribe in their five-year search for justice through a mass action lawsuit against the Ford Motor Company,” HBO stated in a promotion for the recent New York premiere at the Time Warner Center Theater. The film airs on the cable channel on Monday at 9 p.m.

During a discussion with the audience after the New York showing, Ringwood resident Roger DeGroat politely but firmly countered disparaging remarks about his Native American community that were cited in the film, such as in Ford internal documents about backwoods residents who lived adjacent to the company’s hazardous waste dumps in mine shafts and woodlands where local families hunted for deer and other wildlife: “I wonder what nationality has to do with dumping paint on people," said DeGroat, stirring an outpouring of applause. "I’d like to live to see the day they clean it up, all of it.”

Filmmakers Maro Chermayeff and Micah Fink display an array of stunning scenery and harrowing scenes to bring viewers inside a close knit hamlet on a forested mountain ridge above the shimmering Wanaque Reservoir, New Jersey’s largest water supply source, and next to bucolic Ringwood State Park, where cancer, diabetes or other severe illnesses have stalked nearly every home. The residents’ ordeal started, they recall, when Ford bought the mining works around their homes where generations of family members were miners. From 1967 into the early 1970s, Ford contractors dumped thousands of tons of lead-based paint sludge mixed with benzene and other chemicals, as well as car parts from Ford’s massive assembly plant in neighboring Mahwah.

Others who think industrial waste doesn’t affect them should reconsider, film producer James Redford told an audience at a preview showing this week at Ramapo College, a mile downstream from the former Ford manufacturing plant in Mahwah. “To assume you are living in a safe environment may be a dangerous assumption,” he said. That’s a major message of this film, said Redford, son of movie star Robert Redford.

“I know what it means to not feel well,” said Redford, noting that he has had two liver transplants. “But I wasn’t lying in bed knowing I was there because of negligence from other people. To me,” he said of his interest in making this film,” the core issue is health, that people’s health could be compromised.”

As the film dramatically shows, the Ringwood residents’ health complaints, however, never made it before a jury. A state court judge raised seemingly insurmountable barriers to presenting the health problems of more than 600 people and the potential side effects of hazardous waste they were exposed to. And just then, the national economy tanked and Ford’s future as a viable vehicle maker looked increasingly shaky. The residents’ gold-star list of lawyers headed by The Cochran Firm urged accepting a $11 million settlement offer before Ford went bankrupt. The municipality of Ringwood reportedly paid an additional $1.5 million for its role in turning part of Ford’s dumping grounds into a municipal landfill operation.

What makes this story more than another American tragedy to be mined for how clueless to our own welfare we often can be is that the Upper Ringwood Neighborhood Action Association led by Wayne Mann, Vivian Milligan, Jay Van Dunk and others refused to accept defeat and successfully pressed the US Environmental Protection Agency to overturn a previous decision to accept Ford’s assertion that the worst of the toxic waste had been removed. This led to Ford removing several times the amount of tainted soil and paint waste as it dug up initially, including waste with elevated levels of lead that were buried in residents’ yards and an unpaved driveway where children played.

“While Ford admits dumping in Upper Ringwood, their lawyers insist it was legal at the time. The EPA placed Ringwood on the Federal Superfund List in the 1980s. Under EPA supervision, the site was officially ‘cleaned-up’ by Ford and taken off the Federal Superfund List in the 1990s, but most of the toxic waste remained. In 2006, the residents of Upper Ringwood made history when their community became the first site in the country ever returned to the Superfund List. Today, the EPA admits it ‘missed’ nearly 80% of the toxins in the original cleanup,” the HBO website notes. The film notes that Ford representatives declined to be interviewed.

Behind the scenes, Ford and EPA are still sparring with the Upper Ringwood community over whether or not to remove untold tons of hazardous waste that was dumped and bulldozed into deep mine pits just yards away from residents’ homes and mountain streams that flow to the nearby Wanaque Reservoir, which provides drinking water to some two million New Jersey residents.

“I hope the film is an inspiration,” director Maro Chermayeff told the Ramapo College audience, which included many residents of the Upper Ringwood community and supporters from neighboring towns where tons of Ford paint waste was also dumped, and in some cases was later removed and in other places is still there next to water supply streams. ”You can speak out. You can be heard. You can get out and help other people. I think you guys did an amazing job of banding together.”

“This community made history,” added director Micah Fink.

The Ringwood residents’ health issues and the extent of industrial contamination in and around their community were initially documented in a 2005 series of newspaper articles, accompanied by an extensively researched website, titled “Toxic Legacy” published by The Record of Bergen County, NJ. I was a reporter with the investigative team that did that project. Adding a far more visual rendering of this story, this documentary adroitly weaves on-the-scene reporting and follow up commentary by fellow Record reporter Barbara Williams and myself.

Going beyond the newspaper accounts, the filmmakers present haunting snippets, for instance, from 8mm home movies made by Milligan’s father that showed local children playing amid Ford contractors’ dump site equipment and paint sludge slurry while community adults scavenged through the hazardous landfills for saleable auto parts.

In more recent scenes filmed for the documentary, community residents talk about how friends and relatives who lived amid the expanding landfills began to die of cancer and other diseases at younger ages. Health investigators hired by the lawyers are shown discussing with residents that many of their health problems are known to be potentially caused by exposure to hazardous industrial substances such as PCBs, lead, arsenic and dioxin, a highly toxic impurity that can be released into the environment by burning many common chemicals. As the film shows, Ford’s dump sites in two of the mines burned for weeks, spewing thick smoke through the community.

“I like the fact that people are getting to see some of the hardships that we went through,” Vivian Milligan told a Record reporter after the showing at Ramapo College. Wayne Mann, a Ringwood State Park worker who led the community through the lawsuit battle with Ford, said watching the film “hurt because it was my family.” In a telling scene in the film, he shows a filmmaker a wall in his hideaway office full of photos and mementos of family members and friends who died young.

A sobering note at the end of the film states:
“During the five years spent making this film, thirty members of the community died, without ever knowing the outcome of the case.

“A year after the case was settled, Ford posted profits of $2.7 billion.

“In 2010, Ford posted profits of $6.6 Billion,
Its largest profit in 11 years.

“As of 2011, 74 million people in The United States live within four miles of a Superfund site.”

For more information:
http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/mann-v-ford/index.html
http://toxiclegacy.northjersey.com/
http://www.northjersey.com/news/071311_Upper_Ringwood_residents_environmental_battle_showcased_in_HBO_documentary.html

Sailing for Peace

Golden Rule in June 1958 (Honolulu Star-Bulletin photo)

Beyond the July 4th fireworks celebrating historic battles against the British empire, American history includes many other memorable moments when courageous acts of conscience stirred the nation to steer a peaceful tack against the winds of war. One of those moments was in the spring of 1958 when a retired Navy captain, Albert Bigelow, set off in a small sailboat to nonviolently challenge the United States military use of the South Pacific as a nuclear weapons testing zone.

Concerns about radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests and the possibility of nuclear war worried many people around the world. When authorities stopped the “Golden Rule” as it sailed out of Hawaii and arrested Bigelow and his peacenik crew, a tsunami of antinuclear testing protests erupted across America. “Later that year, the beleaguered U.S. government agreed to a nuclear testing moratorium,” historian Lawrence S. Wittner recently noted in an article in Z magazine on the impact of what he called the “legendary” sailboat.

Bigelow—a World War II veteran who died in 1993 at age 87—continued protesting preparations for waging nuclear war and what he saw as other outrages, joining the Freedom Riders in 1961 on another history-changing journey. The “Golden Rule,” meanwhile, sailed off into oblivion until it was dredged up last year from the bottom of Humboldt Bay in northern California.

Shipyard owner Leroy Zerlang was torn between cutting up the salvaged wreck or preserving it in a museum, Wittner wrote. Now a crew of history-minded volunteers is working to restore the 30-foot wooden ketch and sail her under the flag of Veterans For Peace. "She's going to be the peace boat out to confront militarism and needless war," project coordinator Fredy Champagne recently told The Sacramento Bee.

“It was the Golden Rule's peace mission that captivated Champagne,” noted Bee correspondent Jane Braxton Little. “After a year of combat in Vietnam, he retreated to the hills of Humboldt County, living as a recluse with post-traumatic stress disorder. One morning in 1988, he suddenly decided to build a hospital in Vietnam.

“Since then Champagne has organized 23 teams of veterans to build dozens of medical facilities, schools and homes in Vietnam. His ‘people-to-people diplomacy’ campaign also includes driving the Kosovo Peace Bus, which held ‘teach-ins’ in major U.S. cities; building water systems in Iraq; and organizing a 2000 trip to Cuba for the Lost Coast Pirates Little League team.

"”Waging peace has saved my life,’ said Champagne.”

Champagne and other members of the Golden Rule Project of Veterans For Peace set a goal of raising $50,000 for repairs, including replacing the deck and cabin. They plan to launch the ship by next summer to tour U.S. waterways to promote the peace group’s “goals of nuclear disarmament, abolishment of war,” Champagne wrote in a report in the current issue of the Veterans For Peace Newsletter.

The Golden Rule Project organizers’ vision and enthusiasm is contagious, Grandmothers for Peace International’s director, Lorraine Krofchok, stated in that organization’s spring 2011 newsletter.

“This little ketch could be used to educate ‘the future’ and how peace is the only alternative to constant war and aggression,” Krofchok wrote after visiting the storied sailboat in dry dock in Fairhaven, California. “Our oceans are bombarded with ‘war games.’ The Golden Rule could become a lead boat in a Flotilla of Peace.”

For more information:
http://www.vfpgoldenruleproject.org/
http://www.zcommunications.org/the-golden-rule-will-sail-again-by-lawrence-s-wittner
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/06/28/3731864/eureka-volunteers-work-to-restore.html#ixzz1RI61yj6A

Eyes of Babylon in New York

Jeff Key

Jeff Key took the long road—via Iraq, a ditch in Texas and many other way stations across America—to perform on a New York stage. Key is currently presenting a slice of his own life as a gay Marine in his one-man show, “The Eyes of Babylon,” at 59E59 Theaters.

Reviewers have stretched to find cultural comparisons to Key’s mind-blowing monologue, which he developed from a war journal he wrote in Iraq in 2003 and worked out in unexpected places, such as Cindy Crawford’s roadside peace camp in 2005 outside President Bush’s Texas ranch, and honed in performances in community theaters from California to Kentucky. “[It's] as if Jack Kerouac went to war." (Salt Lake City Weekly) “A poetic depiction worthy of Allen Ginsberg." (L.A. Times)

I first met Jeff Key, who is a board member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, at an IVAW-sponsored Warrior Writers poetry workshop and reading in New York a couple of years ago. I’ve heard him at subsequent workshops and readings present variations and offshoots of the stories in “The Eyes of Babylon,” which runs 90 minutes. On stage, he is a more compelling performer than was Allen Ginsberg, who was no slouch at drawing rapt audiences. As a reviewer in The Advocate noted, Key’s dramatic presentation moves “from humor to tears to outrage in the blink of an eye."

Key, who grew up in Alabama, is proudest of presenting his bluntly critical outlook on the war in Iraq and coming out as a gay Marine in conservative places such as Liberty, Kentucky, that drew protests from gay-phobic Christians.

“There was a bigger audience there [in Kentucky] than was here tonight,” Key said after a recent preview performance at the off-Broadway theater complex on 59th Street near Park Avenue. “Liberty, Kentucky is the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else and still they came out to hear me.”

What they heard and saw was a scene by scene awakening of a handsome, six-foot, four-inch tall, muscular Marine discovering in Iraq that his love of country and sense of patriotism had been hijacked to wage war in a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 assaults on America.

More unsettling for many people, audiences see Key hesitantly reveal to fellow Marines that he’s gay. What happens next is what makes this play work as both art and insight into cultural change in America. Reading his war journal to other Marines, Key discovers his voice for memorably conveying things the way he sees them.

"You can't say, 'I support the troops' and step over the homeless vet going to your flag-waving rally, and criticize veterans from this war who are speaking out against it," Key said in a 2006 interview by Sam Hurwitt in the San Francisco Chronicle, posted on Leatherneck.com’s Marine Corps Forum. "To me, that says support the troops until they come home, or until their politics or their religion differs from yours."

As Hurwitt noted, Key’s play includes a clip on a large screen of “a Paula Zahn interview on CNN in which Key (who joined the service in 2000 at age 34) came out as a gay Marine against the war, and quotes a letter to his commanding officer in which he declares that the same principles that led him to join the Marines prevent him from silently going along with the military's discriminatory policy toward gays.”

The unexpected bombshell of the performance follows a penultimate scene in which this seemly model Marine slowly takes off his medal-bedecked blue dress uniform and lays it out as though for a funeral. Donning blue jeans and picking up a trumpet, Key states that when a fellow Marine convoy driver he eulogized earlier in the play died in Iraq there were fewer than 900 U.S. war deaths; yet now the number of military fatalities from Iraq and Afghanistan is more than 6,000.

Crisply raising the trumpet, Jeff Key plays the haunting notes of “Taps” as photo after photo after photo of soldiers’ grave markers flash on the screen.

“The Eyes of Babylon” show at 59E59 Theaters runs through July 3.

For more information:
http://www.theeyesofbabylon.com/
http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-27428.html

A Lasting Lesson in Courage

photo/Library of Congress

In the spring of 1961, as I impatiently awaited graduation from high school, the news of the world was a blur to me. Unless there was a war zone or rumor of war involved, I paid little attention. So I don’t recall being aware of one of the big events of the time—the Freedom Riders challenge of racial color barriers in Southern states.

Keenly aware that the American Civil War started 100 years before, in April 1861, I was seeking my own battlefield glory in a war somewhere. So I scarcely gave a thought to the courage displayed by strangers risking life and limb to expand civil rights to “colored people,” as African-Americans were widely called at the time. Like most Americans, I think, I hadn’t a clue what “nonviolent civil disobedience” meant.

As a recent PBS special, “Freedom Riders,” graphically shows, the black and white volunteers who nonviolently sought to integrate long-distance buses and public restrooms and restaurants at transportation stations in the Deep South in 1961 were beaten by mobs of angry white men, arrested by local police and jailed by state officials. After a Greyhound bus that carried Freedom Riders was firebombed in Alabama and riders beaten at several stops, more than 300 civil rights riders were arrested and thrown into a Mississippi state prison, and a biracial group of 10 clergymen from the North were arrested for trying to eat together in an airport restaurant in Florida, the federal government stepped in and began enforcing non-discrimination laws that had been ignored for generations.

“Nothing would deter these Freedom Riders - not beatings, not burnings, not racist mobs,” noted Gregory Kane, the conservative Republican columnist, in a recent tribute to the men and women who mounted a nonviolent campaign to accomplish what Civil War battles and other clashes over the course of a century could not.

I got some insight into the impact of the Freedom Riders campaign when I was stationed at Ft. Rucker, Alabama some three years after these events. The focus of the civil rights movement had shifted to Selma, Alabama, where bloody confrontations with local and state police over marches for voting rights made national television news coverage.

Amid training for waging war via helicopters in Vietnam, the infantry unit I was assigned to was put on alert to be ready to assert the federal government’s role in upholding the US Constitution in Alabama. Old-timers in the unit joked about having gotten campaign medals for being dispatched in previous years to Little Rock, Arkansas and other Southern flash points where furious white residents and their local officials tried to prevent "colored people" from attending segregated public schools and colleges.

Having already served a tour in Vietnam, and declined a promotion to stay in the military and return to the war in Indochina that seemed wantonly senseless, I signed up for classes at a base branch of a nearby state college while awaiting my discharge papers. It was there that I met a professor who astounded the globe-trotting, way-of-the-world-savvy soldiers in his psychology class.

The professor noted that he had been teaching at a famous university up North and decided to come back to teach in his home state. “Why?” a seasoned sergeant blurted out.

Alabama in the winter of 1964-65 exuded the tensions of a third world country rumbling with pent-up hostilities between authorities and an emboldened group of natives protesting a culture of violent oppression. My brother was in Air Force training at another base in Alabama and got caught up in a police action in the state capitol, Montgomery, against a civil rights protest. The off-duty GIs hit the ground and hunkered behind cars while cops with fingers on their triggers roamed the streets and screamed at the Air Force boys to get the hell out of town.

Well, the civilian professor quietly said to his class of soldiers, this is where the fight is to change my part of the country for the better. He came back to teach, at Troy State College, he said, to help fellow white Southerners understand it was time to change their minds, their culture, their psychology, when it came to their fellow citizens who happened to have a darker hue.

Some day, I’ll remember that professor’s name. What I thought at the time was, that man just displayed more courage on behalf of other people’s welfare than I’d seen in an army lording it over people of another race while playing war on the far side of the world.

As for the civil rights protesters battered by state and local police in Selma, Alabama: On their third attempt to march to the state capitol, on March 21, 1965, the route was impressively lined by thousands of U.S. Army troops, National Guard members called up by the federal government, FBI agents and federal marshals, arrayed to protect 300 marchers. Some 25,000 people joined the last leg to the state capitol building for a rally for voting rights for black Americans.

That night, a white woman from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo, was shot and killed while driving marchers back to Selma. The ambushers were Ku Klux Klan members who included an FBI informer. That roadside murder effectively was the last shot of the Civil War. The Selma to Montgomery march through Alabama stirred Americans to turn a big page of history.

“As a result of this historic event, the [federal] Voting Rights Act was passed on May 26, 1965,” notes a brief history on the National Park Service website for the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail. Deep in the heart of Alabama, the majority of Selma’s city council today is African-American, as is Mayor George Patrick Evans, a graduate of Troy State University.

As my old professor in Alabama said, this was a timely fight—and it took more courage to do it nonviolently in the face of brutal encounters with police and hate-filled mobs. Yet the legacy for human dignity spurred by the Freedom Riders is far more enduring than the official slogans shading the violence unleashed in Vietnam in the name of democratic rights many Americans were denied and had to fight for at home.

For more information:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/

http://www.nps.gov/semo/index.htm