Protesting Concentration Camps

Protest demonstration in Elizabeth, NJ
(photo/Jan Barry)

Americans don’t usually think of ourselves as cruel. But there’s no other word to describe our nation’s gulag-like prison system that now includes concentration camps for increasing numbers of people whose crime was trying to come to America.

Years ago, I met a woman in New York City whose family fled from a civil war by walking out of Russia in the winter of 1919 and made their way to America. Her worst experience on arrival was spending a few days in a dormitory on an island in New York harbor, which she fondly recalled for an exhibit at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration.

That is not the story of today’s emigres herded into barbed wire enclosed detention warehouses, tent camps like what Japanese-Americans were kept in as prisoners of war, private prisons run by incarceration corporations and overcrowded county jails.

“Holding them in cages where they die in custody is unacceptable,” Essex County Freeholder President Brendan Gill said yesterday at a protest demonstration at the Elizabeth immigration detention center near Newark Liberty International Airport. Gill joined hundreds of protesters, including families with small children, calling for closing what many signs and speakers called “concentration camps.”

"I can't imagine, now that we have a child, being separated, and knowing what is going on with the kids,'' Tina Jensen of Guttenberg told a reporter for NorthJersey.com. Jensen and her husband Joel Garcia stood with their 2-year-old son, Ethan, amid an upset crowd of 200-300 people who filled much of the street in front of the immigration detention building. Elizabeth police officers patrolled crowd control barriers to provide a narrow passageway for trucks and cars entering and exiting a Fed-Ex and other truck distribution facilities.

The privately owned prison is set in a busy trucking warehouse area near one end of the main airport runway. Huge commercial airliners roared just overhead every 90 seconds or so, the sound so loud no one could hear the speakers.  

"I just don't think what we are doing reflects the values of this country,'' Naz Pakizegi of Montclair told the NorthJersey.com reporter. "Just thinking of the children, the parents, and the desperation that brings people out." 

When I lived in Montclair years ago, Brendan Gill was a neighbor. His younger brother and my youngest son played together. The town, like all of New Jersey, all of the United States, was full of people whose families came from Ireland, Scotland, Russia and other nations during troubled times. Why is it that people trying to flee hard times in Central America are treated as enemies?

Why aren’t we sending the Peace Corps to El Salvador and neighboring nations instead of perpetuating a history of military missions that created the chaos in Central America?

These are some of the thoughts I had as I stood with the protesters in Elizabeth.

Michael Eckstein RIP

Mike Eckstein at Secaucus Vet Center Art Group
(photo/Frank Wagner)

Mike Eckstein joked about his ailments as he talked about scheduling another round of surgery for spinal problems that left him bent over and unsteady without a cane. With a mischievous grin, he traded quips with Frank Wagner, a fellow Vietnam vet and multiple surgery survivor, at a recent Warrior Writers writing workshop at the VA Vet Center in Secaucus. But for the date with a doctor, Mike would surely have made the trek into New York last Tuesday with Vet Center art group members to visit the Museum of Modern Art.

That’s where we learned via a cell phone call that Mike had died in the hospital. He was 74.

Among other things, Mike Eckstein was a walking, talking encyclopedia of hard-earned knowledge about Agent Orange and its monstrous offspring, dioxin. A member of New Jersey’s Agent Orange Commission, Mike testified before government agencies, organized public meetings for vets and family members to speak about their health experiences and hear from experts on emerging information on dioxin health effects, and issued periodic updates on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans of America New Jersey State Council’s Agent Orange/Dioxin Committee.

To cope with his own health problems, Mike was a regular at the weekly art group that met at the Secaucus Vet Center. He created paintings about things on his mind, including Agent Orange spray planes, the Army truck he drove in Vietnam, and baseball, which he excelled at when he was young. More recently, he dropped by the monthly Warrior Writers workshop and wrote sprightly vignettes about memorable experiences in the military and as a kid growing up in The Bronx.

Mike often laughed that he got more paint on his clothes than on the canvas. A numbers guy who retired as a corporate chief financial officer, Mike could nail a spreadsheet but struggled with drawing a straight line. His artistic strategy, deployed by many of the paint brush wielding vets, was to paint over mistakes with layers upon layers of acrylic. The result was a vibrant rendition of a vet’s memory. Many of these pieces were hung in various art shows including at the Brennan Courthouse Gallery in Jersey City and Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck.

As noted in the Star-Ledger obituary, Mike was “the beloved husband of Susan (nee Segal), devoted father to Craig (Tricia), Matt (Jim), and Cindi; cherished grandfather (Elmo) to Danny, Maya, Alex, and Martin; loving brother to Stanley and also leaves many nieces and nephews.”

Some of his art work was on display at the funeral home.

One of Mike’s best talks about his life and the debilitating health effects of Agent Orange was posted on YouTube. See it here: 

Letters to the Wall

Veterans For Peace 2019 Memorial Day ceremony, NYC
(photo/Jan Barry)

Today, members and friends of Veterans For Peace are placing envelopes at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC containing letters to and for the dead to be shared with visitors paying respects this Memorial Day to the ghosts whose names grace that wall. The letters were written by veterans, military family members, war protestors, peace activists—all stirred to speak by the consequences of the endless, dinning drums of war—from across America.

Here is my contribution to this grassroots commemoration of what we’ve lost to war. I read it yesterday at a gathering of Veterans For Peace members and friends at the Battery in New York City. The event included a procession carrying a flag-draped coffin from war memorial to war memorial to war memorial. Around us swirled crowds of people from around the world boarding and departing tour boats to the Statue of Liberty. Battlefields where American soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and women in uniform died span the world. The names of all the dead could fill a wall beyond imagination. Just imagine the life cut short of one name. 

At the Wall in Washington

The Vietnam Wall is where the dead

Greet the living eye to eye—

Face it, your eyes

Staring back from the black marble

Framing a soldier’s name—

Your soul and his startlingly entwined

Jan Barry

US Army Vietnam 1962-63

Earth Era

A flock of phlox  ( photo/Jan Barry)

This Great, Green Earth

How often we forget the debt we owe

This great, green Earth:

The land, the food, the water, the air…

The mysterious, solitary parent of our birth.

From whatever speck of wet in the universe

Life may have come at first,

It is Earth that cradles us and sustains us,

To whom we are joined for better or for worse.

Let us walk this great Earth once again as guests,

Not as conquerors or even hosts—

For we are no more immortal

Than bluebirds or the continents’ coasts.

--Jan Barry

From Earth Songs II: Poems of Love, Loss and Life

Warrior Writers in Action

Sarah N. Mess and Jan Barry at Wild Project, NYC
 (photo/Omar Columbus)

It was a reunion of sorts. Veterans of various wars getting together and catching up. Instead of a bar, in this case the reunion was on a stage in New York City. Many of the vets have been getting together for years in Warrior Writers writing workshops, Combat Paper art workshops, theater workshops, stage performances. In many ways, it was like jazz musicians getting together to jam in a public place.

“Veteran Voices 2019” at the Wild Project theater in the East Village also included newcomers attracted to this eclectic bootstrap-art collective. The theme of a weekend of performances by five diverse groups was “Resilience.” The March 16 gathering of veterans provided just enough time for a rehearsal that blended into the 3 pm performance and an after-party in a fusion cuisine Chinese restaurant.

Produced and hosted by Jeremy Karafin of Poetic Theater Productions, the event was co-curated by J.A. Moad II and Jenny Pacanowski.  Moad, a former Air Force pilot, created the Veterans’ Voices Initiative in Minnesota. He performed his play “Outside Paduch—The Wars at Home” as part of “Veteran Voices 2017” at the Wild Project.  Pacanowski, a former Army combat medic, founded and is the Director of Women Veterans Empowered & Thriving and directs plays and poetry performances in Pennsylvania and New York.

On Saturday, men and women in street clothes stepped out of the audience in seemingly random sequence. Abruptly, in ones and twos, they delivered dramatic commentaries, poems, songs and a radio play, conveying stories ranging from World War One to Vietnam to Somalia to current battlefields that filled what had been a virtually bare stage.

Omar Columbus performed a poem, “White Marker,” about writing messages on bombs to be dropped on Baghdad. With photos of himself when he was a grinning Airman posing beside hand-marked bombs flashing on the wall behind him, Columbus recalled being haunted that his mother’s name was on a bomb that obliterated a palace building used as a military barracks and who knew what else.

Donna Zepherine quietly reeled off a litany of adversities in her life, including two Army tours in Iraq, the husband who left, and a baby who died on Veterans Day. Then she listed the veterans’ groups, college advisors, writing and theater groups who helped her regroup and build a career in social work.

“She’s Gone” is the title of a performance by Monique Arrucci on the experience of coming home from war in Iraq and being told by family members that the happy-go-lucky girl who joined the Army after 9/11 didn’t come home. Arrucci spun that stunning story into a song that tried to piece together her missing old self.

In “Veterans Highway,” a poem I collaborated with Sarah Mess on, Sarah did a rap on vets’ home front experiences, weaving in her interactions with other vets forming informal support networks:

No Yellow Ribbon Brigade on the 9^th floor East Orange VA cancer ward

No Star Spangled red, white and football field blue cheers

For a little boy of 19 contaminated by war for almost 50 years

Lonely old vet rotting in a VA hospital…

Pick line feeding tube, chemo on drip…

Final days spent alone in an abandonment haze…

my mind on mefloquine

mefloquine on my mind

left behind…left behind…no veteran left behind…

the flags flying in Uncle Sam’s yard can’t cover

up the lies

steaming with burn pits, depleted uranium, agent orange,

toxic degreaser dirty water, lariam poisoning, anthrax shots…

where are the forget me nots for

vets losing body and mind…

called crazy to cover the lies…

old vet motto is “deny till we die”

support the troops but leave the vets behind

I read selections from my new poetry collection, Earth Songs II: Poems of Love, Loss and Life. One poem had particular significance for me to read at that location. It was about memories of a fellow member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Jeff Sharlet, who died young, not long after the last time I saw him when I lived in an East Village apartment near this theater.

Invisible Wounds

For Jeff Sharlet, 1942-1969

Editor, Vietnam GI

I still see

You striding, urgently

Looking for me that day,

Pushing through the

Crowd on East Seventh Street

Milling at the park full of hippies

And squads of cops—

My first instinct was to duck

And escape your intensity,

I was already burning out

Protesting that damn war

We fought in—what more

Did you want of me—

What more could I say

About that sucker?

Was that the last time

I saw you? Spring 1968?

Cancer took you not long after,

At age 27,

I read in a daze

Far from the clashing crowds

Of hippies, cops and war protesters,

Trying yet again to make a new life—

I had no idea, Jeff,

The war was literally burning

You up inside.

The wrap up piece was an ensemble presentation of segments of a play titled “Porch Sessions: The Girls of Iraq,” written by Jenny Pacanowski, spoken with descriptive stage directions as though on the radio. It conveys the thoughts of a young woman, a war-whiplashed Army medic, who goes to a fancy salon and has flashbacks to events in Iraq, including convoy duty where she was the driver of a medical vehicle and, with other female soldiers and an inexperienced male captain, a frontline fighter when the convey came under attack.

Over the years, I’ve interacted with many of the veterans who staged this memorable event in various writing, art and theater workshops and previous performances. The creativity and camaraderie are always amazing. Their resilience is inspiring.

For more information:

www.poetictheater.com/

Renewal Energy Sierra Club Campaign

Across the United States, dozens of municipalities have officially set a goal of transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy. These include Atlanta, Georgia; Kansas City, Missouri; and Washington, DC. Nearly a dozen counties in several states have taken this action, as well as the states of Hawaii and California.

Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania is the latest community to sign up for the 100 percent renewable energy campaign, promoted by the Sierra Club. The board of supervisors voted unanimously last night to support a Ready for 100 resolution, local activists Lou Ann Merkle and Michael Gillen reported on Facebook.

“Congratulations to our Whitemarsh Township for joining 100 other U.S. cities and towns resolved to transition to 100% Renewable Energy!” Merkle, an artist and teacher, wrote. “It was exhilarating to work with so many wonderful, skilled colleagues/friends on our Whitemarsh Township Environmental Advisory Board and staff, and in the Montco Ready for 100 leaders group.”

Gillen, a retired history professor and author, lauded Merkle’s skills in presenting the proposed plan to the governing body. “Lou Ann Merkle made the pitch. The unanimous vote for approval by the supervisors was followed [by] cheering and hugs, understanding of work ahead, and hope for the future.”

Despite Facebook’s notable negative impact on American society of enabling nasty concocted rumors, deliberate misinformation, political hack attacks, and creepy personally targeted ads, activists have found it quite useful for organizing local to national campaigns.

The Sierra Club and its state and local chapters have Facebook pages followed by substantial numbers of people. The national Sierra Club Facebook page is currently congratulating Monona, Wisconsin for joining the Ready for 100 campaign.  

“On Monday, March 4, Monona City Council unanimously passed a resolution to commit the City to 100% clean, renewable electricity community-wide by 2040 and for all energy sectors, including heat and transportation, by 2050,” the Sierra Club page announced. “Monona joins Madison, Eau Claire, and Middleton as the 4th #ReadyFor100 city in Wisconsin, and is the 3rd city powered by Madison Gas & Electric to commit to 100% clean, renewable energy!”

And in case you missed it on the missing-in-action mainstream news, the Sierra Club Facebook page reported that New Mexico’s legislature recently passed “a historic bill that will transition all electricity generation 100% carbon-free by 2045! Pending Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham's signature on the bill, New Mexico will join California and Hawaii as the 3rd state in the U.S. to set a 100% carbon-free electricity mandate.”

More than 22,000 people liked that post and more than 500 Facebook readers shared it. Besides sharing photos of babies, pets and smiley selfies, many activists throw into the mix notices of campaigning so babies, pets and life on Earth have a better shot at a healthy future.

For more information:

https://www.sierraclub.org/ready-for-100/commitments

Warrior Writers at Stockton

Somalia vet Sarah Mess reads poetry at Stockton University
(photo/Jan Barry)

A Warrior Writers workshop at Stockton University in Galloway, NJ on Saturday drew more than a dozen diverse participants to write and talk about often harsh experiences in the military and beyond, including brushes with death, survivor guilt, sexual assault, and hidden impacts on family members.

The multi-ethnic group included a wife who attended with her husband, a sister who came with her brother in memory of another brother who died young after serving in Vietnam, men and women veterans of the Air Force, Army, Navy and Marine Corps who served in war zones from Vietnam to Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as a wide variety of other duty stations including Germany and Guantanamo Bay.

Several workshop participants then presented selections of their poetry or prose in a performance in the college theater. The writing workshop and performance were adroitly guided by Valerie Stemac, an Air Force veteran whose transition from PTSD patient to poet is conveyed in a new HBO documentary, “We Are Not Done Yet.”

The film is about a group of combat veterans and otherwise severely injured soldiers who create a collaborative poem in writing workshops at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland, which they perform together at a theater in Washington, DC, under the direction of actor Jeffrey Wright. Warrior Writers has helped facilitate workshops and performances at military bases and art centers in the Washington area, in collaboration with Seema Reza, co-founder of Community Building Art Works.

Formed in 2007 in Philadelphia, PA, Warrior Writers has fostered workshops and public performances in cities and towns across the U.S., embracing veterans of all eras. In New Jersey, monthly writing workshops are hosted at the VA Vet Center in Secaucus and at Frontline Arts in Branchburg. Public performances have included appearances at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, art galleries in Jersey City, Montclair and Somerville, and the New York City Poetry Festival.

For more information, see:

www.warriorwriters.org/

www.wearenotdoneyetfilm.com/