"Who are you, who who, who who?"*

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Back in 1993, a New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner showed two hounds at a computer, one explaining to the other, "On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog." So true - unless, of course, you tell them. But what does the easy anonymity of internet communications mean as the web becomes the virtual agora of democracy and the repository of the world’s knowledge?

I’ve read many complaints about it on sites and list-serves, and I’ve had a few qualms about it myself. I value transparency and accountability as foundations for democratic discussion; town meeting, like the original Greek democratic agora, is about physical presence. But I value freedom of speech, too. Engraved over the Boston Public Library are these words: "THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE AS A SAFEGUARD OF LIBERTY AND ORDER." Liberty and order - the complementary requirements of civilization.

The good news about net anonymity, of course, is that people can speak freely without retribution. The bad news: people can say anything without accountability.

Fear of repercussions from family, friends or neighbors, from the boss or other employees, and from politically powerful individuals are among the understandable reasons people hide their identity to participate freely in internet discussion. There are many broadly accepted identity shields: authors’ pen names, voters’ secret ballots, journalists’ protection of sources, unsigned newspaper queries to Dear Whoever, workplace suggestion boxes, fraud hot-lines, social service support lines - and remember women writing under men’s names to get their work published? It’s valuable to encourage the airing of controversial points of view to foster open-minded discussion; as the saying goes, a good idea is first ridiculed, then vehemently opposed, then accepted as self-evident.

Think about the uses of masks in real life. Aside from Halloween, is anyone wearing a mask likely to be doing something good? Probably nothing to be proud of, and often downright illegal. But then, many pop-culture superheroes assume their powers when they don their disguises, and use their "everyday" appearance as the mask, so they can function in a way that lets them learn where their help is needed.

Of course, freedom of expression can be abused. Even the Constitution isn’t interpreted to allow shouting fire in a crowded theater. Internet writers often abuse their cover, posting scathing, even vulgar, statements they’d never utter if identified - statements which may be factually false, or simply so crude as to reflect badly on them.

But the antidote to objectionable free speech is, as in "real life," more free speech. The ACLU can morally advocate to protect Nazi marches, because anti-Nazis are free to demonstrate in opposition. And there are many ever-changing, gray areas in defining the "good guys" who deserve free-speech protection.

There are web antidotes as well. Since the offending messages are out in the public domain, the victim has the option to reply and rebut and even to shame. But the victim has to know it’s there to do that. In my web searches, I’ve stumbled upon my name on sites where my positions and actions are wildly misrepresented. I am willing to be hated and reviled for what I believe, and I never disguise my identity; but since my goal is to share my information and views with others, this misrepresentation is a significant subversion of my work. And yet, I can’t patrol the internet searching for wrongs to be righted in the characterization of my statements. And even if I do, will I reach the same people who read the mistaken postings, now buried in the site’s archives or gone altogether? It’s a very limited recourse, and accountability is elusive.

On the other hand, by-lined newspaper reporters often misstate my comments inadvertently, or make factual reporting errors; my infrequent letters of correction to the editor are seldom printed and probably never read. Indeed - the internet becomes the antidote, providing a way to get these corrections to the public (or such public as stumbles upon them) when the papers don’t.

Anonymity is also costly to the speaker in compromised credibility. Unclaimed statements should be discounted by the reader: If the poster won’t stand behind his words, we might give them less credence. We all know that "facts" can be manipulated and presented selectively. When we know who’s speaking, we know how to weigh the words: does the speaker have a vested interest, or is s/he peddling self-serving propaganda? Does s/he have factual credibility, or just saying what’s expedient? But our culture honors the written word; people tend to believe what they read. I’ve seen high school students writing papers using solely internet research, citing the "facts" in the first few entries on the screen, without checking the source for conflicts or credentials; they don’t even record their references, so unaware are they of the importance of the source. What will happen when newspapers become news-sites, and the moral authority and legitimacy of the web are further reinforced?

Anonymously conducted illegal internet activities, such as financial fraud and child abuse, must, of course, be pursued by enforcement authorities, who have to deal with today’s technology as they did to the cut-and-paste hold-up note and the get-away car. Sometimes a site will have to be closed, or special tracking for identity is needed. And for some types of net-crime, the net offers like solutions, e.g., letting officers pose as potential victims to engage the criminals.

But the everyday, simply annoying bad netiquette, like other socially unacceptable behavior, will have to be reined in by peer pressure and e-shunning as suit the offense. On net (pun intended), I’d trust that process, flawed as it is, over giving any individual, group or agency the authority to define free speech and privacy. The abuse of that kind of power, all too easy as we’ve seen on the federal level, would fundamentally threaten a democratic society.

Shirley Kressel
Published in the South End News

*Title of song by “The Who”

Proud at Pride

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

There I was, between the Stonewall group and the Queer Femmes, with the pounding Latin music of the Baccardi truck ahead. There were feathers and sequins and condoms, T-shirts with double-entendres, balloons, fishnet stockings, and very high heels holding up very tall guys. I, for my part, was in my usual unremarkable attire, holding a simple blue and white sign on a wooden stick, as one of the marchers for Sonia Chang-Diaz, who is running again as Democratic Senate candidate for the Second Suffolk district. I was at Boston’s Gay Pride parade - and, indeed, proud of being there and supporting a candidate who supports gay rights.

Many thoughts went through my head as we grouped up and waited to start. I was thinking above all about my 34-year-old son, Mark, in whose lifetime the situation for gay people has changed so dramatically. I e-mailed him that I was in the parade; he currently lives in Las Vegas and had days before marched in the Salt Lake City pride parade (yes, astoundingly, they have one). I’d have been moved and happy to participate even if I didn’t have a gay son, even if I didn’t have gay friends, just because progress in human rights for any group is progress for all of us. But I felt especially happy that I could join Mark and show support for him.

It’s not this way all over the country, you have to understand. Boston is a safe haven city; there’s still danger and exclusion in much of America, especially in the less urban terrain. This is yet another reason (besides the economic and environmental ones) that urban life has always been so important to civilized society and human growth, providing the diversity and tolerance that we need for personal development. I’m so glad there are places where I don’t have to worry about my son.

Now we’ve granted equal marriage rights, and amazingly, straight marriages somehow survived. I think of the New Yorker cartoon, a middle-aged married couple, weary husband in recliner reading a newspaper headlined, "Gays to wed," saying to wife: "Haven’t they suffered enough?" Well, they should be allowed to share all the suffering and happiness the rest of us do. When Mark came out to me, I said: "Does this mean...you’ll never have children who treat you the way you treat me?" He replied: "I wouldn’t be too sure of that." I continued, "Well, does this mean no one will ever wear my wedding gown again?" And he said: "I wouldn’t be too sure of that, either."

Mark tells me about the suffering of so many gays in the face of parental rejection and cruelty. I remember a young woman at an office where I worked yesteryear, who told me how her parents had not accepted her when she came out to them; I couldn’t believe parents could turn away from a child for this reason, and I could see how much it hurt her. I’m glad there’s a place like this, where they can find kindred spirits and acceptance, and I hope their parents come around before it’s too late. This event, to be together with everything out in the open (in some cases, literally), must be an important experience to carry them through the hard times.

As we march, I see some people I know in the crowds, which are huge in the South End, and sparse in Beacon Hill. We get some nice applause as Sonia comes into view, but the Queer Femmes behind us really get riotous receptions. I chant for Sonia, but I join the Femme calls too sometimes. Why not? I’m not queer, but I sure know how "different" feels.

The crowd accumulates on City Hall Plaza, which I think has become a symbol of regression on civil rights in some ways. But today, it’s a place for everybody, outrageous and ordinary, gay and straight, young and old, people of all sexes, genders and identities, the stage for everyone’s presentation of self. I know I look out of place to the celebrants, but I’m more a part of them than they know.

Maybe I’ll have another chance to march at Pride, and who knows what kinds of progress will have been made by then. Maybe it will be in a small town. Maybe AIDS information won’t be necessary. Maybe a Mayor in fish-nets will lead it (whether or not he has nice legs). Maybe it’ll be part of the St. Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston. Maybe people will be wondering if we still need a Gay Pride parade. We’ll see. I’ll let you know, Mark.

Shirley Kressel
Published in South End News

Stop wasting food

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Like Johanna Spryri’s Heidi squirreling away her dinner rolls, I was, as usual, wrapping up leftovers at a restaurant, when a dining companion wondered why I bothered. I looked at him, amazed: "You could be hungry later, and you’ll regret this waste." He answered, puzzled: "Why? There’ll be more food later."

My parents, Holocaust survivors, spent the best years of their lives scrambling to save our family from starvation. My father, who never let a scrap be wasted, told me, "I swore that if I made it through, I would never throw away a crust of bread as long as I lived." That’s how I grew up. We had no confidence that there would be more food later. Often, there wasn’t.

Now, I live in a cornucopia of lavishly over-stuffed markets and restaurants. And I see workers every day throwing products off the shelves and into plastic trash bags, life-stuff becoming instant garbage: "Out of code." Items that can sit safely at home for days, maybe weeks (in the freezer, months), are dumped because their sell-by date is up. I ask them if they are donating it to food banks or shelters. Sometimes they have arrangements, more often not. There are regulations, liability issues, logistical problems, storage issues, pick-up scheduling difficulties, etc. I offer to just trundle it over to a shelter in my "little-old-lady" shopping cart. No; I’d have be certified to have a refrigerated van, etc. Could employees take it home? No.

Catered events are notorious waste-fests. I beg the wait-staff to take home the beautiful untouched platters of food. They are forbidden to do so. Restaurants, schools, hospitals - the waste is staggering. From production to plate, we squander our sustenance.

There’s a sizeable research literature on food waste. According to 1995 USDA estimates, about 96 billion pounds of food, over a quarter of the 356 billion pounds of available food, goes to waste in fields, commercial kitchens, manufacturing plants, markets, schools, and restaurants. On average, each American consumes about three pounds of food a day. If even five percent of the 96 billion pounds were recovered, that quantity would provide a day’s food for four million people.

A 2004 USDA-funded University of Arizona study estimated, shockingly, that almost half of our food supply is wasted, at a loss of tens of billions of dollars annually. Specific findings:

• Commodity market speculation leads to pre-harvest losses of about 18-20 percent of American-grown fresh produce.

• Supermarkets discard about one percent of their perishables.

• In fast food chains as much as 40 percent of the food is wasted.

• Mom and pop stores and restaurants are least wasteful.

• Households waste about 14 percent of their food purchases; 15 percent of that includes products unexpired and unopened. An average family tosses out $600 a year in meat, fruits, vegetables and grain products.

• About 30 percent of milk and other dairy products, grain products, fresh fruits, and vegetables, and 15 percent of meat, dried beans, nuts, and processed fruits and vegetables, are discarded.

• Nationwide, household food waste adds up to $43 billion a year.

• Americans throw out about three times as much food today as they did 20 years ago.

• Halving food waste could reduce adverse environmental impacts by 25 per cent through reduced landfill use, soil depletion and applications of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.
Then there are the numbers on hunger in America, from the USDA, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, and other sources:

• In 2006, over 35 million people, including 12.5 million children, lived in households experiencing food insecurity - 11 percent of our households. This is up from 34.9 million in 2002, 33.6 million in 2001, and 31 million in 1999.

• The U.S. Conference of Mayors reports that in 2006 requests for emergency food assistance increased an average of seven percent; 48 percent were from families with children, and 37 percent of the adults were employed. Unemployment, high housing costs, inadequate earnings, and high medical costs contributed to the rise.

• Almost half the cities in the Mayors’ report said they can’t meet food requests; 63 percent reported they had to cut the quantity of food provided. About 23 percent of the demand went unmet, up from 18 percent the previous year.

• America’s Second Harvest, the nation’s largest network of food banks, reports an estimated 25 million people turning to the agencies they served in 2006.
Reports of famines have always come from remote "primitive" places, seemingly irrelevant to us. But it’s happening right here, under our noses.

And recent newspaper stories warn of a dwindling global food supply. The UN describes an "unforeseen and unprecedented" shift, cutting the world food supply and inflating prices to historic levels. Daily reports tell of soaring grain prices and shortages, as food and bio-energy uses compete; ocean fishing bank collapses due to industrial emissions and over-fishing; the hazards of China’s huge seafood farms; global warming, droughts, skyrocketing transportation-fuel costs, seed-stock privatization, pollution. "Perfect storms" of converging problems all over the world are threatening the food supply. Although we feel protected from famine by our money and technology, our rapidly rising food prices are advance heralds of inescapable shortages. Don’t wait until the crisis reaches your table - and it will - to open your eyes. There are some things you can’t buy your way out of, at any price.

Let’s each make a resolution for this new year to look into this problem, and to do what we can to stop waste at every level and to get available food to those who need it.

Shirley Kressel
Published in South End News

My Summer Vacation

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400

This summer, I had an opportunity to visit two very special places in Europe.

One was Dachau, Germany, an ordinary small town near Munich, and home of the first, and one of the most notorious, World War II concentration camps, now a memorial and museum.

Dachau didn’t start as the now infamous torture and murder machine of the war’s civilian victims. It was set up in 1933, six years before the war began, for political prisoners. The museum describes the creation of the Nazi tyrannical regime through gradual erosion of civil, political and human rights, a step by step take-over of the government and the society, rationalized by economic fears and ethnic scapegoating.

I was struck by the film footage of Dachau residents, forced by the liberating allied soldiers to view the piles of corpses (including those of their former neighbors) and crematorium ashes, lying a stone’s throw from their homes. These good burghers turn in horror, shocked, shocked that this could have been happening in their respectable town. What were they thinking when they saw and smelled that giant smokestack down the street? When thousands of people – 200,000 in all -- were shipped in on local trains, and virtually none shipped out? When Nazi soldiers came into town, fraternizing with the locals, did no one think to ask what they were doing behind those walls? The audio guide ends with a report of a study done just after the war about what people knew, concluding that in all the hundreds of towns hosting concentration camps, people certainly knew that “something very dubious” was happening, under their noses. Early mass resistance might have avoided it, but, well, it wasn’t about them, and some were even profiting, as in every catastrophe.

I also visited the Normandy beaches in the north of France, the site of the allied invasion harrowingly portrayed in the movie, “Saving Private Ryan.” Having let the Nazis go so long, this is what it took in the end, sending soldiers straight into the crosshairs of German bunker guns, to turn that war around. Hundreds of thousands of casualties, some 600 French villages destroyed, cities all over Europe devastated, thousands of homeless refugees -- including my own parents, driven from their homes in Poland, to the collective farms of Russian Siberia, to a string of Displaced Persons camps across Europe. In one of these, the lovely Austrian mountain town of Ebensee -- home to one of the most diabolical concentration camps -- I was born. No survivor of that war, and no one born of survivors, could ever again see life in a normal way.

There is plenty for us to think about in this story, here in our own home. Our federal government, in a “war on terror,” or in the name of “freedom” (corporate freedom, primarily) is slashing away civil, political and human rights domestically and abroad, and concentrating power in the executive branch. And it’s not just a Bush invention.

Corporate interests have, since the war, been strategically promoted by our government at the price of international chaos, as described in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. The corporate share of federal income tax revenues has fallen, since the 1950s, from over 30% to under 10%, with 60% of U.S. corporations paying no taxes during the 1996 –2000 boom. The same is true at state and municipal levels, where officials are busy subsidizing developers and other corporations, at the expense of working families. Taxpayer revolts are leaving a decaying public realm, vulnerable to corporate calls for privatization. David Rockefeller was quoted by Newsweek International, in 1999: "...somebody has to take governments' place, and business seems to me to be a logical entity to do it."

The F-word – Fascism – is increasingly being used to describe our escalating corporate statism. "Fascism,” Hitler’s Italian ally Benito Mussolini said, “should rightly be called corporatism, as it is the merger of state and corporate power." The growing wealth gap between the upper few and the bottom many again threatens social stability and peace.

And torture, slavery, and genocide are still going on all over the world, with only scattered bleats of protest from the good burghers of America.

So, how are you doing? Do you think your family, and your little nest egg, are safe, and you’re best off tending them quietly, not rocking the boat? We’ve just seen that every dollar in the world is connected to every other by, as the expression goes, six degrees of separation. Poor buyers of little houses tricked into unpayable mortgages? What does that have to do with me? Or …with the Asian stock market? Well, unlikely as it might have seemed, that bell does seem to be tolling for all of us.

Oil, “peak oil,” Middle-Eastern oil, South American oil: do you have to think about all these as long as you can fill ‘er up? Well, yes, as it turns out. Especially if you have relatives in the military. Or you care about the Amazon’s bio-bank of flora and fauna. Or you live near what is now sea level. Or you pray a moment when you board an airplane or a subway.

Every ordinary aspect of our lives is linked to critical world-wide events, and we hide from this realization at our peril. These are man-made events, and we are watching, indeed, helping, someone’s agenda unfold. If we don’t get up off the couch and do something, before organized protest becomes dangerous or impossible, we will end up staring into some other crosshairs later.

As 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke warned, “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”

I picked up a couple of pebbles as I exited the Dachau camp gates, to put on my parents’ gravestones, and went back home resolving to do more.

Shirley Kressel
Published in South End News

Ordinary People

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0500

I love American Idol! And Rock Star INXS and karaoke bars, even. I love Top Chef and Project Runway. And open mike nights at comedy clubs. Spelling bees and talent shows and dance auditions. Essay contests.

I’m fascinated with grungy kids on the subway with big instrument cases, and once, on the bus, an unremarkable guy traveling with a set of bongo drums. Buskers singing and playing sax or violin or whatever, selling their amateur CD’s in the T stations.

I just love the idea that ordinary people, who don’t look special and live their ordinary little lives, can suddenly be “discovered,” and astound everyone with wonderful music and knowledge and cleverness. I like striking up conversations with strangers in lines and on buses, and finding out that people are nothing like what they seem; the guy with the big neck tattoo is a veterinarian, the buttoned-down salesman is into foreign pop music and linguistics, the young woman in a dull windbreaker staring vacantly into space is a recording studio talent scout. Who woulda thunk it? (They, in turn, are amazed to discover that a frumpy gray-haired matron is a landscape architect!)

Once, on a long wait for the Green Line, I was especially enchanted with a T-station performer, an wizened black fellow with a great blues style; it turned out that he had been a professional jazz club singer way back when. He actually invited me to join him in a few bars, and there it was, a strange duet of a black jazz singer and a middle-aged white lady with shopping bags. (I am not making this up; scarred witnesses may still be around.)

And what about those “undesirables” in the street? Who are they, how did they get there? If you ask a few, you might find what the National Survey of Homeless Assistance Providers and Clients reported in 1996 — that 23 percent of all homeless people — and 33 percent of all homeless men — are veterans. They got that way fighting for us, and losing their way once home again. I once got to know a scruffy street dweller, who was hired by some friends for odd jobs. With his first paycheck, he bought beer and oil paints, both of which, I guess, helped him produce his memorable satirical poetry and haunting winter landscapes. Comedian George Carlin used to do a skit where he acts out a brief history of a man who starts off like any ordinary fellow, and through a series of unexpected fall-throughs suddenly finds himself out in the rain with his belongings. It was funny, but it was true and poignant. I saw that a long time ago.

Recently, immigrants are, as cyclically happens, being demonized as the alien horde, the burdensome takers, the cultural strangers. I don’t get it. I love immigrant neighborhoods; I love hearing other languages in the street and seeing them in store windows. The food, the clothes, the whole fresh way they look at what we can’t even see any more. I am an immigrant; my parents bided six years in Canadian exile to join their family here so they could enter legally. My husband’s parents were illegal immigrants. Forever to remain outsiders, they buried their “back home” dreams and talents (two were fashion design aspirants) and slaved away their decades in menial labor, kept their sidewalks neatly swept, and nurtured to fruition, in total, two doctors, a lawyer, a public school teacher and a landscape architect/would-be subway singer. My husband’s public school in Brooklyn, full of fresh immigrants, produced an astonishing number of accomplished people in arts, science, education, journalism. The Boston Globe reported recently on a National Venture Capital Association report that immigrants have started one in four venture-backed companies since 1990 and two in five in high technology. Immigrants, one successful entrepreneur opined, “are risk-oriented and like to take on the big ideas." Massachusetts, the study found, is second only to California in having the most venture-funded public companies founded or co-founded by immigrants.

So, when teeming hordes of people in Africa or Asia or India appear on the screen, scenes of hardship and struggle, a million undistinguishable faces of … whom? I wonder: Who among them — if they were saved from starvation or brutal wars or AIDS — would invent the next Google? Who would take care of preemies in the hospital? Which of those raggedy kids could be the next inspiring political leaders, the next prize-winning novelists, the discoverers of drugs that would save lives and stamp out disease? But I know they’ll all be wasted, washed away without a chance, their skills spent on sifting garbage heaps or working in slave-labor mines or other bare-subsistence grinds. There but for the grace of God …

That’s what I think about when I’m looking at reality shows, talking to strangers on the bus, watching the life on the city streets. I like knowing that behind so many of those everyday, nondescript facades, even the dubious-looking ones, there are wonderful gems. I hope they are all “discovered,” eventually.

Shirley Kressel
Published in the South End News