American Healthcare: American Genocide

November, 2009


"But he isn't wearing anything."
From The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen

"Perception is reality. It doesn't matter what the facts are. We don't have time for the facts. We're going to do it the way people think it's best to do it."

My boss wasn't kidding. I had just presented him the research I had prepared that proved a plan he wanted me to implement would cost the department more not save funds as he had previously announced to his faculty. He was up for faculty review. The "plan" was popular among the faculty. If he implemented it, he would be viewed as responsive to their ideas. Educating them would be time-consuming, confusing, and might be misunderstood. I complied with his directive, of course, because, I, too, wanted to keep my job. The facts bore out. The plan cost more money, but rather than concede the plan was the problem, we invented another excuse for the outcome and then spent even more funds addressing the "problem" we had invented.

The term "genocide" did not exist before 1944. It is a very specific term, coined by the U.N. and refers to violent crimes committed against groups with the intent to destroy the existence of the group. Human rights, as laid out in the U.S. Bill of Rights or the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, concern the rights of individuals.

On December 9, 1948, in the shadow of the Holocaust, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This convention establishes "genocide” as an international crime, which signatory nations “undertake to prevent and punish.” It defines genocide as:

“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:’
“(a) Killing members of the group;
“(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;’
“(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;’
“(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;’
“(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

It is important to note in this definition (see letter "c") that negligence that leads to loss of life qualifies as genocide, as well as direct slaughter.

There is a related term of relevance, namely "Crime against Humanity." A Crime against Humanity consists of certain acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, in pursuit of a state or organizational objective.

Still, there is often scholarly quibbling about whether it is one or the other when massive death in a specific population is driven more by political expediency than by hatred of the group. The number of deaths to qualify as genocide is also a quibble, but generally a million deaths hit the mark. Deaths due to lack of access to healthcare will reach that mark, if we start counting them this year, by about 2015.

Some historians maintain it is still genocide if a group is targeted out of political ambition rather than a constructed hatred of the group or a comprehensive intent to eliminate all members of the targeted group. E.g. the actions of Joseph Stalin leading to the deaths of about seven million Ukrainians is considered genocide by some scholars and not by others. In 1932-33 the former leader of the Soviet Union caused a famine in the Ukraine because the people there were seeking independence.

The difference of opinion also persists when considering the slower elimination of about fifty million Native Americans following the European invasion of North America in the fifteenth century, since the objective wasn't necessarily to kill all native people but to occupy and appropriate their land.
Even more controversial has been the claim the U.S. response to AIDS/HIV in the 1980s was genocide. Proponents of defining it as genocide point to the fact that more than 20,000 gay men had died before there was any state response to the epidemic and that a response only was triggered when a significant number of members of the dominant culture (heterosexual people) were infected by the virus. In fact, religious leaders like Jerry Falwell fiercely resisted any response to the epidemic calling it "God's way of weeding his garden." And, while Falwell's comment seems more outrageous today, at that time it was considered a simple difference of opinion to which Falwell was entitled.

The change in how remarks like this are viewed is relevant toward how genocide is defined. That is, massive loss of life among a targeted group is more apt to be deemed genocide years, if not centuries, after the incident even though it was not at the time.

In any case, the primary prerequisite test to qualify as genocide must include evidence that "dehumanization" of the targeted group has taken place. To begin the claim of genocide it must be established there have methodical and intentional schemes to cast members of the targeted group as less human or less worthy of survival than members of the dominant culture.

A case can be made—and likely will be made at some point in the future—that the contemporary practice of healthcare in the United States, if allowed to persist unstopped, is genocide. As many as 100,000 people die annually because they cannot afford healthcare. About half die because they do not have health insurance, and the other half die because their health insurance provider will not pay for the care they need to survive. The apartheid of healthcare access in America is glaringly obvious. The healthcare one receives in the U.S. depends on the healthcare one can afford. The wealthy have no fear whatsoever that they will receive the best health available. The targeted group includes those who cannot afford the healthcare they need to survive. Comprised primarily of the working poor, the size of the targeted group is increasingly exponentially and proportionately to the greed and political ambition of those who benefit from health insurance company profits.

These deaths are not caused by a lack of fiscal or natural resources. Everyone in the nation could have access to healthcare for less cost to taxpayers if corporate profit was eliminated from the equation, and few knowledgeable people deny this. These deaths persist because corporations wield more national power than those whose lives are lost.

None of the incarnations of legislation seriously considered by the 111th Congress ever intended to stop a significant portion, let alone all, of these deaths, even though it was entirely within the scope and resources of Congress to do so. Indeed those lives that will still be sacrificed to the god of profiteering were never acknowledged nor mourned nor even given a moment of silence when Nancy Pelosi cheered at the passage HR3962 even though she knew this legislation would effectively still allow many to die.

Even though legislation had been introduced and reintroduced since 2003 (HR676) that would have covered everyone by eliminating insurance profiteering, this legislation was not only not taken up, it was blocked from even mere discussion by the Speaker of the House and the White House at every turn. Even the president said at one point, regarding healthcare reform summits, "Everything is on the table. Well, everything but HR676."

"Why was HR676 blacked out?" This is a salient question and adds evidence that allowing thousands to die was an intentional act by the State. Undoubtedly the motivation by the State and the Health Insurance Industry which essentially owns and controls the State, was to avoid what they knew would be a public outcry for HR676 if the public learned the bill's merits.
Merely asking this question, however, not only pricked the ire of the State, a.k.a, the corporate control to which it yielded, but also vexed those whom one might assume would have been natural allies.

Healthcare forums sponsored by "progressive" Democrats didn’t merely exclude HR676 from their line-up. Across the country, they banned and even had arrested activists who tried to expose the cover-up.

"We're all for HR676," progressive Democrats sometimes claimed, "but there's not the political will to pass it now."

When pressed, some, like Iowa State Senator Jack Hatch, admitted at an Iowa healthcare forum last March (at which the keynote speaker was Blue Cross Blue Shield representative and Republican former Iowa Governor Robert Ray) that "political will" was not lack of public support, which by most polls was overwhelming for such a bill. "Political will" was the lack of support of healthcare corporations who bankrolled too many Democratic election bids .

Or, as U.S. Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said at an AARP healthcare forum in late summer, "Just because most Americans want something doesn't mean Congress will do it."

Partisan loyalty took precedence over human life. And many political progressive groups whose prestige and/or paychecks required party loyalty capitulated. Groups like Move-On.Org, Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and HCAN's Iowa affiliate Iowa Citizen Action Network (ICAN) advocated any legislation that Nancy Pelosi said to support.

For example despite the fact that ICAN had distributed petitions since March for a "Public Option" that would give Americans the ability to drop their private insurance if they so chose, their party loyalty did not waver when they issued invitations to two events with the purpose of thanking U.S. Congressman Leonard Boswell for voting for HR 3962. They did this even though HR 3962 didn't merely fall short but was completely contrary to what they had promised the thousands who signed their petitions that legislation they supported would include.

HR 3962, in fact, rendered Americans with not more, but less choice, than they'd had before. Rather than being able to drop expensive private health insurance for a "public option," Americans would now be required by law to keep paying those premiums. Further, those who had opted to stay uninsured rather than pay high private insurance premiums would now be forced by law to buy private insurance whether they wanted to or not. "Affordability" would no longer be determined by the budgetary needs of families but by the State with the determination heavily administered by private health insurance companies. Additionally, rather than helping "all," the bill's authors admitted HR 3962 would still leave twenty million people without access to healthcare, an estimate it is reasonable to believe will be far less than reality. (The Senate bill is even worse and will not—because it cannot—improve this.)

When this betrayal was pointed out, ICAN conceded in an email that, "While we may wish that the house bill provided even more relief, it currently includes provisions that will make real improvements in the lives of Americans that may compare with the passage of Medicare and Social Security."

How the word "may" was intended in this statement is hard to know. Suffice it to say that ICAN did not, because it could not, specify what these "real improvements" were. Certainly the faulty analogy made between HR 3962 and the Medicare and Social Security quickly falls apart under even superficial scrutiny, if for no other reason than that neither of the latter two acts required Americans to enroll in either program, let alone forced them to be consumers of any private industry. What was clearer in this statement was the implication that to "wish" for something more, i.e. to save those lives that would be lost under this legislation, was idealist and even frivolous, like wanting more frosting on an already delicious cake.

When all else failed, Democrats pulled out their most tired clichés and canards. Phrases like "politics is the art of compromise" and "crafting legislation is like watching sausage made" were regurgitated ad nauseum as if they had justifiable meaning. "Incremental change" morphed into an ethic that was held higher than committing what could be morally if not legally described as the negligent homicide of thousands. The problem is that genocide and crimes against humanity can't be stopped with incremental change. How do we decide who still dies?

Perhaps the most cynical scam pulled on the American public was that there ever was a real struggle for the passage of HR3962. The evidence for this was apparent from the beginning when Senators Max Baucus (D-Montana) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) were named chairs of the Finance Committee forums on healthcare reform. Both are among the top-three Senate recipients of campaign contributions from health insurance companies. The obvious conflict of interest in this was not particularly challenged by many "progressives" who remained inclined to give the new administration "a chance." Consequently the bulk of the legislation crafted in the House and the Senate was written by health insurance industry staff, making sure every provision ultimately included a strong financial benefit for the companies they represented. The predestined and accomplished goal was anything that happened was to be a windfall for the insurance companies.

Meanwhile a faux public battle was waged with a handful of "tea-baggers" (the instigating ones likely hired by private insurance) and given ridiculously overblown coverage by national news media that was undoubtedly capitulating to the millions it received from the health insurance industry in advertising revenues. (Not coincidentally, the hundreds to thousands who demonstrated and rallied for HR676—including the more than 200 who were arrested at these actions—were never given a moment of air-time by national media.) Concurrently, Organizing for America (OFA), Obama's grass roots group, staged events to "stand up to big insurance" by supporting the Obama Plan, while behind the scenes the White House was arm-twisting reluctant legislators to give-in to health insurance company demands. What was portrayed as a "win-lose" struggle for the American People was never more than a win-win game for private insurance, with insurance company executives chortling all the way to the bank, knowing they would make out like the bandits they are either way. In the end House Representatives mostly voted according to their roles in this theatrical performance. It should not be considered a coincidence that the outcome that most financially benefitted private insurance was the one that won.

Another pocket of resistance to exposing all of this came from anarchists and even a few Catholic Workers who worried, among other worries, that HR 676 gave too much power to the State. Even though HR 676 significantly diminished State power over access to healthcare (in that the only State involvement was to appropriate funds to pay medical bills) compared to the current practice and that both had far less State intrusion than the legislation the 111th Congress advanced, they balked at being perceived to support any legislation offered by the State. The suggestion that U.S. healthcare practices were inextricably tied to war (because war funding and healthcare corporations are themselves inextricable) was met with particular skepticism, as if how people were killed and where they were killed for corporate profit made them any less dead. These concerns remain inchoate and beg further discussion and questions. How can one call for Congress to use war spending for healthcare and resist legislation that does that? Can anarchists sometimes step aside from fundamentalist ideology when a State act saves life and liberty—such as the Emancipation Proclamation, the Martin Luther King-driven Civil Rights Act, or the enfranchisement of women?

Still, the influence of Catholic Workers was ubiquitous in the resistance to Congressional lies regarding healthcare reform. Nearly every organized action included a current or former Catholic Worker. The first resistance action before a health insurance company was organized by the Des Moines Catholic Worker community and led to the arrest of nine at Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield in Des Moines. Hundreds followed their lead and 183 were arrested at sit-ins at other insurance companies throughout the nation. Those arrested included Sam Pullen, a member of the Center for the Working Poor Catholic Worker community in Los Angeles. Sam's witness included refusing bail, remaining in jail, and a hunger strike to draw attention to those who suffer and die because they are denied healthcare.

Their efforts were not completely in vain and pushed two amendments toward consideration that would have at least ameliorated the viciousness of HR 3962. One, an amendment put forward by Anthony Weiner of New York replaced the entire bill with a single-payer provision. While certainly doomed to fail, the amendment would have at least identified with some surety which House Representatives really did support HR 676 and which did not. This "is you is or is you ain't my baby" hope was stripped by none other than President Obama himself, who personally strong-armed Weiner into dropping the amendment late on the night before the vote.


Capitalism is most insidiously evil when it commodifies and restricts access to resources human beings need in order to survive. Accomplishing this first requires diminishing and dehumanizing those who will not or cannot comply. Human beings are reduced to their value as consumers, financial contributors or investors. Human beings that cannot provide capital gain—the poor and unemployed or under-employed or those who decline to be cannon fodder in wars for profit—are not worth saving. They are in fact a barrier to profit growth, and so, the dominant culture or the culture that dominates, (the wealthy, corporate owners and shareholders) inflict conditions that allow them to die. Rather than shown compassion, the dead and suffering are blamed for conditions over which they have no power and are shamed as irresponsible, lazy, or unpatriotic.
Perception is not reality. Reality is reality. Pretending something is other than it is doesn’t position us to change what it is. Still when the word “genocide” is used in connection with healthcare, some take umbrage, as if somehow suggesting an atrocity in these intentional deaths somehow diminishes lives lost in other atrocities.

It may be this umbrage that is the best evidence for such consideration. It is the lack of intense populist outrage that proves our collective acceptance of the dehumanization of those who will die. The seamless accomplishment of this by itself stands as justification for investigating healthcare practice in the U.S. as pending genocide. History has certainly and repeatedly shown powers and populace choosing to ignore or minimize infamous acts of genocide at their nascence. And history, has shamed us later when we knew the massive body count could have been much less if we’d not called early critics “reactionary” or “extremist.” It only gets serious when it’s our child, parent, spouse, or friend.

This column is a prologue begging for such consideration. Perhaps this time we can interrupt the mounting body count before such an ascription is undeniable. The longer we delay this rather than demand an end to our ghoulish national practice in healthcare, an ever-increasing share of us will be added to the targeted group of disposable humanity.

The Empire does not need a wardrobe adjustment. The Empire is naked and naked with the shame of this inhumanity to man. Those of us who care must, at the very least, call it what it is.

Sunshine Is Often a Choice

by Mona Shaw

We starve, look at one another, short of breath

Walking proudly in our winter coats

Wearing smells from laboratories

Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy.

Forty years ago this past spring, I was on a planning committee with my best friends Tom, Michael, and Stephen to take our college freshman theater class to see Hair in Chicago.  We had just organized an anti-war demonstration triggered by Nixon's bombing escalation in Cambodia. 

Tom had been released from the V.A. hospital, after being gravely wounded as a Marine in Vietnam.  His right forearm still had a huge purple gash, and his right hand was still paralyzed from shrapnel.  He was uncommonly handsome and exuded confidence and charisma, except for those times when he dove and then trembled under a table or bench when a car back-fired or fireworks sounded and sucked him back into a jungle in Southeast Asia.

"There's got to be a better way," he whispered to a room one night, while fiddling with the fringe on my handmade patchwork poncho.

The quickening intimacy between us surprised everyone, including me.  The white-trash girl from the poorest neighborhood and the golden boy from one of the most affluent neighbors in town would not have sat at the same lunch table in high school.  But our amalgamation made perfect sense to him, and he demanded it.  I felt his constant stares soon after his arrival at junior college.  He wouldn't have been at this school had he not "patriotically" chosen to enlist in the Marines despite his parents' protestation.  He was biding time until he transferred to Lawrence the following fall.  I avoided him and scurried away each time he tried to speak with me.  I'd been burned enough as some rich kid's do-gooder project; he could adopt someone else.  Oh, yes he affected me, terrified me really.  I didn't admit this then, but I feared that allowing him close would leave too huge a mark, and I didn't want it.  One day in class his eyes burned holes into my belly as I gave an interpretive reading from Nevil Shute's On the Beach.  I had to sprint from class that day to keep him at bay.  However, he found me at a party that night and begged me to go outside and talk for just five minutes.

"I only came here to see you," he said, "I need you."

"What for?"  I answered feeling swallowed by his intensity.

"You have to help me end the war," he answered patently.

"Really?" I said sarcastically, "Vietnam or the war on the poor or the war on Black folk or just any ole war that might come along?"

"They're all the same war," he said. "and you know it."

The only response I could give, of course, was "Okay." 

Hair was more than a musical.  It was a movement.  The lyrics and melodies reflected the hopes and fears of all the years.  I have yet to witness anyone after listening to it who remained unaffected. Things were changing.  Everyone felt it, and Hair told us what was changing, and that the change was good.  It was a movement and Michael and Stephen joined us.  Grandma Cory would often say then, "The four of you are something."

I've been an activist now for almost 50 years, beginning on a strike picket line at the factory where my mother worked when I was ten.  I spend some of my sabbatical reflecting on this and all the "movements" since in which I have taken part.  Had I known back then, that things would not been become better decades later, but much, much worse.  I think my heart may have been too shattered, as they say, to keep on keeping on.

As it is, my heart is shattered plenty, and I mourn with every pore despite the unparalleled joy I paradoxically know through my two-year-old granddaughter Wrigley.  Tom died 38 years ago now, Michael 14, Stephen 7; and Grandma Cory 24.  I don't see evidence that we accomplished much.  So, when I take Wrigley for a walk to St. Vinnie's thrift shop, and I see a woman there wearing a faded t-shirt that reads, "Jesus died for our sins," I want to take her in my arms and weep.

"Yes, sure, but don't you get it?" I want to say. "People die for our sins every second.  It's more common than summer mosquitoes.  Millions upon millions—in war, lack of healthcare, AIDS/HIV, dying, dying, dying from all manner of greed and corruption.  Do you understand this government funding we bicker about is a paper fantasy?   And not just people, we're killing all the animals in Ecuador, the Gulf, the North Pole.  We could change this.  We could, but we're broke, financially and spiritually.  We're more Orwellian than Orwell: lying is truth, cowardice is prudence, media manipulation is called information.  Selfishness and avoiding pain/compassion are called emotional stability.  We don't just engage in denial; we're wed to it in our pretense that it's not as bad as we know it is.  I'm ready, like Dostoevsky, to give up and just write for no one who will ever read it about our inevitable demise."

I don't tell her this.  Instead Wrigley and I stroll to Dingman House. In the front hallway; Wrigley notices a poster on the ceiling for the first time.

"What's that?" she asks me.

"Honey, that's a photo of Earth."

"It's so beautiful!" she exclaims in yet untarnished wonder.

How can I not yearn for a better world for her?  Love still can trump the deepest despair.  Later, in my prayers, the paraphrased words of the martyr Harvey Milk stitch to my soul, my sin and salvation.

"If you want a world where people care about others, then care about others, and you will live in that world.  If you want a world where people put their body on the line for justice, then put your body on the line for justice, and you will live in that world.  If you want a world where we love our enemies, then love your enemies, and you will live in that world.  If you want a world with forgiveness, then forgive and you will live in that world.  If you want a world that is gentle and kind, then be gentle and kind and you will live in that world."

"Somewhere, inside something,

there is still a rush of Greatness….

Let the sun shine in."

Heterosexism as a Metaphor for Capitalism

 “In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.”

-Bertrand Russell

It is never just one thing, is it?  You decide to clean a room, and you need to empty the vacuum.  The vacuum filter is broken, and you leave to buy another, but the car is low on gas.  Because the car is low on gas, you have to find your new debit card, and the PIN doesn't work, so you have to phone the bank, which means you have to dig through a cluttered drawer for the secret answer to your security question that you now can't remember. When you finally return to the room with the new filter, someone has borrowed the vacuum.  By the time you find the vacuum, there is no longer time that day to clean the room.  However, while you were at the store, the clerk tells you a neat little trick about vacuuming pet hair that makes the job go much faster when you are able to tackle it. And, the cluttered drawer search has unearthed a document you thought you'd lost.

It's a lot like that to struggle for peace and justice.  No task within this effort ever involves just one thing. Even our interruptions are interrupted, only to be interrupted by yet more interruptions.  And, because of this, it becomes not concentrated effort toward our goals or objectives, but interruption that comprises the bulk of our quotidian lives.

This uncontrollable and unavoidable phenomenon flies in the face of the cultural paradigm that tells us that the accomplishment of goals requires singular focus.  This is not true.  Accomplishing goals requires us to widen our lens and include more in our vision. A goal is not abandoned because we have been able to incorporate the interruptions and employed them toward a fuller result.

When I first learned that Pope Benedict had compared same-sex relationships unfavorably with killing the rainforests, it was a draining interruption, but I was inclined to brush it aside.  Not because I didn't find the comment painfully ignorant and cruel.  I did.  Nor, was I reluctant because I was afraid of some possible disapproval or fallout from even members of my own movement if I publicly challenged it.  I wasn't.  Homophobia and heterosexism have already taken from me lives far more precious than such a confrontation had the potential to levy.

 While I may be wrong, I assumed the Pope wasn't much interested in my opinion of his opinion.  I wanted to focus on something else, I was in the crux of trying to hone a metaphor, obvious and accessible enough, that it might persuade more people to consider, if not agree, that capitalism (the admiration of wealth) hurts us.  I have become convinced that our collective unwillingness to deeply explore this consideration is the root of all war and human suffering, and that human suffering will not only persist but worsen until we do.

It was implicit or inferred permission, too facilely given, for ignoring this that led me to reconsider.  Remarks that were intended to support and comfort were instead demoralizing and discomfiting.

"This isn't a 'peace' topic."

"The issue is too divisive."

"People aren't ready to hear this yet."'

"This could derail the good we're trying to do."

"We don't have time for this right now."

The "least of these" is not usually identified by conscious selection but are a revelation by default.  The "least of these" are the oppressed among us we are least inclined to help.  The "least of these" are the lepers, the "unclean" we will not touch.  They are those we ask to hide themselves.  They are those of whom we will not even speak.  Or, if we speak of them, we do so in hushed tones and whispers, looking around to see who might be listening.  When we make excuses for not unabashedly prioritizing a stand against the discrimination and persecution of LGBT people, the Catholic Worker Movement—if not the entirety of Christendom—positions lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as the least of these.

Unfortunately, the pain wrought by persecution is not ameliorated because the persecutor didn't know any better.  The statement "I wasn't raised that way," or "We all used think that way," may be explanations, but they aren't exoneration.  It's one thing to disagree with Wittgenstein's assertion that the avatar (teacher) must come from the affected class.  It is another to pretend we value the wisdom and witness of the oppressed more (or at least as much) as those with status and privilege when we're not willing to act as if we do.

This pattern of reluctance to reconsider our evaluation of human life worth cherishing (or the relative importance of people in our lives) draws a template of humanity's rejection of itself. By noticing this, I discovered that heterosexism was a neat metaphor outlining the functional or dysfunctional operatives of capitalism.

Like the Sword of Damocles, the only conclusion greed can reach swings wider and lower toward our necks, but, we risk it rather than walk away from the chance at wealth beneath the blade.

Any human construction (such as capitalism and heterosexism) that requires us to sacrifice our children to it rather than encourage our children to struggle against it is an agent of homicide that has tricked us into fearing the loss of property, public favor, and status more than we fear losing those we love.

The same way parents will turn away from a gay son or a lesbian daughter, we will watch sons and daughters sent to wars based on lies and greed and do little to stop it.  The same way we dismissed the nearly 100,000 deaths in the 1980s caused in this nation by homophobia (AIDS, gay-bashings, and executions), we allow 20,000 each year to die from lack of health care.  The same way we give money to the United Way, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts, churches, and other entities that have blatantly homophobic policies, we keep cutting checks to a Health Insurance Industry that thrives in proportion to how much healthcare it denies not how much it provides.

We want to end senseless death and suffering, but we're willing to pay more to perpetuate it than we're willing to pay to stop it.  Some, but very few, are brave enough to pull a few branches off this evil tree; even fewer are willing to go after its roots.  This apportionment of our resources not only exposes our accepted national routine of serving mammon more than good, it begs a question.

Why are we faithful to those constructions that lead us to do less good rather more?  Why do we continue to cooperate with systems that compel us reject one another rather than love one another?  Why won't we pull the roots?

When Jesus said, "The love of money is the root of all evil," he may have meant that the love of money is the root of all evil.  It is pathological denial to think we can compromise our morality for the acquisition of money without loving money.  Heterosexism is primarily driven by fear of being associated with a lower social caste.  Capitalism, on the other hand, is even less kind.  It not only encourages the love of money (or caste superiority), it requires it.  By these prerequisites capitalism isn’t merely vulnerable to evil, but is the root (cause) of all contemporary evil.  A less hubristic, Bill Clinton might have said, "It's not the economy; it's the economic system, stupid."

It is an insidious evil that has convinced us that we are dependent on it for survival, when it is the thing that threatens human survival.  It is a sadistic stimulus that will sentence a poor woman who has cheated the system out of $100 in food stamps to more years in prison than a rich man who has stolen billions and has a $100,000 toilet.  It is insanity that prizes the risk of the coal mine owner who only risks money, more than the risk of coal mine worker who risks his life in that mine.

The domination of heterosexism and capitalism requires we accept (or least cooperate with) three compelling lies.

Property is more important than people.

It is blasphemy of the human spirit or the potential for anything sacred to propagandize that people are more inclined to work for property than for the good of others.  History has proven we do our best work when we are motivated by love and the satisfaction of accomplishment rather than material gain.  Jonas Salk didn't invent the Polio vaccine for the cash.  Martin Luther King, Jr., didn't spend a night in the Birmingham jail because he was auditioning for the million dollar Nobel Prize.  When it's only for money, we do only enough to get the money.  When we’re motivated by love, we give as much as we can give.

We know who or what we love by how we calculate the return on our investment.  Love is measured by how much we’re willing to give regardless of what we get in return.  Contempt is propagated by wanting as much as we can get for giving as little as possible.

It is epidemic social insanity when one will not risk one’s job or social status to save a life, but will take one’s own life after  losing a job and its status.  Human suffering will not end by learning ways for ourselves and others to acquire more, but by striving together to teach each other how to be content with less.

Some people are more worthy than others.

Heterosexism, like all, human oppression, sprouts in the roots of human greed and grows into a clinging vine of superiority.   Both heterosexism and capitalism are constructed to rationalize why some things in life should be denied to others. 

Sacrificing human beings  to protect property is exercised not so much by witting acts, but by blind acceptance of a scale of human worthiness.  Every construction that justifies one human being having a better quality of life than another is an indirect, if not direct, act of violence.

The American Dream is a human nightmare.  This “dream” of success determined by material gain is the most powerful provocateur of human isolation. The fact that few routinely socialize with those outside their economic class proves we view our monetary income as the best informant of whether we have “things in common” with each other.

Capitalism and heterosexism disparage mutual human regard simply on the basis of being human because they need cultural hierarchy and the admiration of wealth and exceptional favor in order to grow wealth for wealth’s sake.  Oppression controls the privileged with the threat of  the same treatment given to the underclass unless the privileged do not shun them from their intimate or private lives.  (E.g. “If you don’t mistreat them, we’ll mistreat YOU.”)

We size each other and ourselves according to a silly nightmare of meaningless criteria—the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the china we set on our tables—whether we fall in love with someone of the same or the opposite sex. We awaken from the nightmare by daring to reconsider, by daring to question our paradigms of human worthiness.  (E.g. “How can Italian china make me feel more sophisticated?”)

Silence will protect us.

This delusion emerges as the most dangerous to the human condition and our survival.  Silence is the best guarantor of maintaining the status quo. The idea that if we “keep our heads down” and everything will be okay can never come true because it is not based on anything true.

 The lies and corruption recently revealed in the financial crisis have shown us this.  When we spin, as shrewd or talented,  the ability to lie convincingly, we exaggerate fear and mistrust and ultimately collapse into the complete disintegration of  human character.

Why do we teach children that it’s impolite to talk about sex, politics, and religion, when sex, politics, and religion frame every reality?  If  being polite is an act of mutual consideration, why isn’t it impolite to not discuss these things?

Heterosexism clearly demands silence and often shames LGBT people for openly identifying themselves—”Why do they have to talk about it?”

Tragically the damage done by this worsens as acceptance of LGBT people improves.  Twenty years ago to expect silence was to be normative in an environment of silence. Today it is a proactive choice that requires a lot more malice and cruelty. Yet those influences remain not only powerful, but dominant.

To disclose or discuss one’s economic class if one is working class or poor in “mixed company”  is met with no less social derision.  Common accusations of “victim-hood” for such disclosure are most ironic, because it is, in fact, a capitulation to “victim-hood” to keep quiet about it.

While we all may be “equal” in the eyes of God, the realities of the privileged and the oppressed are very different.  Silence or pretending things are the same—may make the privileged feel more comfortable—but it does not and will not make them the same.

Our lives together are superficial and phony until we talk openly about these differences and decide together what to do about them.

It is also wrong-headed to think that the affluent or those who enjoy any form of societal privilege necessarily have less character than those with less privilege.  They do not.  Greed/generosity, honesty/duplicity, kindness/cruelty are truly equal-opportunity phenomena and present among us all.

Still, the time has come for us to sit together at the human table and  talk about how  privilege affects us individually and collectively.   Now more than ever, we particularly need to talk about capital or money—what we think about it, what we do about it, and what it does to us.  To study war-no-more is to intentionally study humanomics, a system that puts people before profits.

Our species and our planet will not survive if we don’t.

The Epistemology of War

by Mona Shaw

Her tight, gray curls would bounce when Miss Hunger, our kindergarten teacher snapped away another chair.

"You're not even trying, Becky," she told a small, timid girl in our class.

"I thought it was nicer to share," Becky whispered.

"This is the cakewalk game," Miss Hunger replied with strained patience, "You win the game if you sit in a chair before someone else takes it."

"But, Miss Hunger," Becky said, perplexed that Miss Hunger didn't see the obvious, "we have plenty of chairs."

Not to be undone by a five-year-old's naiveté, Miss Hunger smiled, "We have plenty today, but one day there may not be enough chairs, and you need to learn how to compete for a chair when that time comes."

Becky was still confused and asked, "But, then, wouldn’t it be better if we were learning how to make more chairs?"

It was a moral contradiction.  Moral contradictions learned in childhood are rarely resolved and normalize a routine of situational ethics that leave us chronically qualifying if not rationalizing these contradictions.  In this context, how does one define “ethics,” let alone war?

We say that sharing is a virtue, but "success" is measured by our ability to hoard or acquire.  Lying is wrong when we're lied to, but becomes prudence if it keeps us in a job or otherwise seems to protect us.  Secrets are labeled with vicious metaphors like “backbiting” when we've been hurt by lies, but lies become “the better part of valor” or discretion when they serve our personal interests. 

While we pretend we believe being “two-faced” is bad; we honor it as a marketable skill under job titles with names like “diplomat, lobbyist, or community relations director.”

Knowledge, when we seek it, is not so much about wanting to know anything, but about wanting to earn a credential, to pass a test for "success," a test written and graded by those we perceive to have power over that "success."  Students rarely enroll in college to learn—you can learn with a library card—but to haul out certificates toward even higher privilege or status.  "Knowledge" becomes a commodity, routinely reduced to parlor games (figuratively and literally, e.g, Trivial Pursuit) in which those who are “certified” to have more of it position themselves as lords over those with less of it.

Inevitably these rationalizations form information itself and create a structure of knowledge comprised of what we believe of what we've been told, and, in turn, we teach or pass on "knowledge" that isn't necessarily, or even usually, what we believe.

Because this is our collective situation, how we know what we know (or epistemology), holds more information about us than what we know, and therefore how we know is more important than what we know.

Accredited history textbooks do not contain facts and events, but are selected interpretations of facts and events written by the victors of war.  Had England won the U.S. Revolutionary War, our scholarly characterizations of the British monarchy, or even monarchy itself, would read very differently.  Had Spain conquered England during the European colonization of North America, elementary school students would engage in pageants about St. Augustine in Florida, rather than about Plymouth Rock or Jamestown.  Had U.S. history not almost exclusively featured the lives and deeds of less than half its population (white, land-owning men), we would read a very different history indeed.

Significant details of battles won and lost, and the actions of the "heroes" involved are routinely obscured or eliminated altogether to the extent they cannot be exhumed by even the most sedulous scholars.  Howard Zinn did the world a great service when he rescued much of our evaded history in his text, A People's History of the United States.  However, Zinn is quick to concede that even in this effort, "There is no such thing as a pure fact, innocent of interpretation.  Behind every fact presented to the world—by a teacher, a writer, anyone—is a judgment."

Moreover historical "facts," particularly the details of U.S. wars are endlessly revised—revisions that sometimes challenge proscribed thought as in Robert McNamera's Fog of War confessions regarding Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Vietnam, and sometimes reinforce the victor's right to power, as in Dick Cheney's Kings of The Hill: How Nine Powerful Men Changed The Course Of American History.

Given that our knowledge of the details of wars is partial and selective at best (and often intentionally misleading); our understanding of what war is can be no more enlightened or true.

In corporate controlled media "if it bleeds it leads" and in the canon of the empire "war is gore."  War defined as gore and weaponry is a contrivance by the authors of war that intends to limit and obscure the horror of war.  The sanitization of recent wars through corporate and governmental censorship of photo and video journalism of battles and casualties is a clear attempt to prevent public opposition to war that was provoked by disturbing coverage during previous wars.  (If there is no gore; there is no war.)  Not so clear, is the cover-up of other acts of war in which the gore is less apparent and military weaponry is not required. (There is no war because there is no gore.)  The covert (not to mention patriarchal) restriction of acts of war to gore and weaponry certainly supports the perpetuation of war by dulling stimuli for resistance.

Other acts of war are hidden on shredded paper under the desks of corporate executives whose wealth depends on war.  The relationship between war and profit lead some to suggest we are indulging in Military Keynesianism, a national economic policy in which the government apportions outsized spending to the military in an effort to stimulate economic growth.  When, actually, Military Keynesianism resides in the good old days or is a phase we passed through in the mid-1990s, when we became an unmitigated war economy. 

Canadian author on the economics of war, Philippe Le Billon defines "war economy" as "a system of producing, mobilizing and allocating resources to sustain violence."  The reality of the U.S. functioning under a war economy is not only evinced by the supremacy of the military industrial complex predicted by Eisenhower in the 1950s.  The military industrial complex now controls the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the U.S.

The deliberate procession to a war economy was entrenched in the 1980s and 90s by Presidents Reagan (busting unions) and Clinton (NAFTA, GATT and the WTO) when manufacturing jobs were driven out of the country.   Given that the GDP measures output generated through production by labor and property which is physically located within the confines of a country, if we set aside the provision of services used in daily living such as education, health care, and auto repair, we generate only two national products: war and capital.

Weapons and war are now our major (and essentially only) exports.  Consumer goods are almost entirely manufactured outside the U.S.  While investments in these goods profit the investors, they do little to grow the domestic economy (i.e. create jobs).  Jobs are now dependent on venture capital (proven by the fact that floundering banks and financial institutions require chronic bailouts in order for our economy to survive), and venture capital is dependent on war.  War, the production of military training and weapons, the military industrial complex, the privatization of war, the control of international territories of capital investments, et al, are the only viable leverage the U.S. can wield to retain profitability in the global economy.  In a war economy, the economy is not simply stimulated by war; the survival of the economy requires war.

In a war economy, every NASDAQ exchange is an act of war, and every financial CEO is a war general.  The current war economy is so insidiously entrenched and partnered with greed so pathological that the collapse of Wall Street may not merely be inevitable, but required and, yes, even desirable in order for human life to ever cease being sacrificed for human greed.

If we are to end war, as well as confronting military sites, we must pressure and abolish the institutions that profit from war.  The health insurance industry is a good place to start.  There is no equivocation in stating that healthcare denial is an act of war.  This is true on prima facie evidence and not only because of the industry's symbiotic relationship with the military.  (Health Net, a major health insurance corporation, is the seventh highest-paid defense contractor.)  Denial of healthcare treatment by this industry leads to at least 20,000 deaths each year.  (Some studies estimate these annual deaths number as high as 100,000.)  Healthcare apartheid and genocide account for an astronomical portion of the casualties of war.

If we are to accept Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assertion, "Peace is not the absence of conflict, it is the presence of justice," we cannot pretend there is a distinction between a justice issue and a war issue.  We can either capitulate to the lies of the Empire that such distinctions exist, or we can study war no more.  We can study peace through our witness to all war profiteers (i.e. all venture capitalists) that we're on to them.  We can teach others how to build more chairs.

Moral Courage

 By Mona Shaw

“There’s more than ten thousand dollars in receipts in the cigar box, “my uncle said.

It was March, 1972, and my grandfather had died the month before. I was staying with my grandmother while I was home on spring break from the University of Iowa. She sat in a wooden rocking chair that had once been varnished dark walnut, but the only way you’d know that was by the streaks of shiny brown on the few places where life hadn't stripped the chair to a grayed, bare pine. I sat on the green sofa-bed, its worn spots covered by a tan wool blanket and matching hand towels over its arms.  One of her hands waltzed lightly over my grandfather’s pipe stand and tobacco bowl on the end table next to her as she spoke.

“Jake didn't dun folks.”  My uncle had anticipated her response and began his rehearsed counter before she finished speaking.

“I know, but you need the money, and they owe it.  And you could help Mona Lynne go back to that college.”  He knew he could tempt her more by what she could do for me than for herself.

“I can’t think of anything we can’t do without today,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, “You're right.  I won’t dun anybody.  But most of ‘em were at Daddy's  funeral and almost everyone asked me to call ‘em and tell ‘em what they owe.  And, I said I would.  Shouldn't I do that since they asked?”

“Maybe so,” she said after a long pause, “but not today.  Can’t it wait till Mon’Lynne goes back to Iowa City next week?”

“Oh, yeah, don’t know why not.  I’ll come back next week then.”

“Bamp,” as his grandchildren called him, had been a popular auto mechanic.  If he had the part or could afford to buy the part himself, he never turned anyone away who couldn't afford a car repair.  He’d tell them to write what they owed on a slip of paper and put it in a cigar box on a bench in the back of his garage.  He never looked in the box, never knew what anyone owed him, and never knew when he repaired someone’s car if there was already a slip in the cigar box or not.  When someone came to pay him, he’d direct them to the cigar box, and accept whatever cash he was handed and put it into another cigar box he kept for cash.  The person either took the slip back or edited the slip to indicate the amount still owed.  He believed it was wrong, in any way, to remind his customers of their debt.

“It’s painful to not be able to pay your bills,” he’d explain.  “I’m not gonna add to any family’s pain by rubbin' their nose in hard luck.”  The slips weren't for his records.  They were for the convenience of his customers who’d asked him for some way to remind them what they owed.  He never looked at the slips.  Never.  Moreover, he made it very clear that he would consider it mean and wrong for anyone else to look at them either.  He was so clear, that until he died, none of us ever did.  

Many of his customers were African Americans, though no one called them that then.  This was how he met his best friend, a Black man with the same name as his, Jake Nelson.  Gram often said that if they hadn't solved the world’s problems it wasn't because they hadn't put the time into it.  A school teacher complimented Bamp once for being willing to do business with the “coloreds” to which he replied, “Don’t take offense, but I’d just as soon not get a pat on the back for not being an asshole.”  

Another time a woman asked him whether white or colored folks were more apt to ask for credit.  “I couldn't tell ya,” he answered honestly, “I don’t see a reason to git interested in that, do you?”

So, I was surprised that my grandmother had relented so easily.  I assumed that if Uncle Eddie hadn't made the promise he had at the funeral, she might not have.  

I was secretly glad.  I looked around the tiny living room or the “front” room as she called it.  There wasn't a stick of furniture that wasn't older than I, and it was probably second-hand when it was purchased.  Besides the couch and the rocking chair, there were a tattered vinyl recliner, a coffee table pocked with innumerable and concentric white rings, a bookcase filled with 1940s encyclopedias used by mother and uncles while they were in school, and an Emerson television they’d bought in 1952.  The floor was a scuffed, flowered linoleum.  The places worn to the cement beneath it were mostly covered by rag rugs that were made by hand.  There were often more visitors in their home than the furniture could sit.  When this happened, chairs were brought in from the kitchen or the garage.  When these ran out, children would sit on laps, or folks would sit on the rugs on the floor.

There was rarely an evening when the front room wasn't filled to capacity.  Folks dropped by most often unannounced.  Gram would make strong coffee or iced tea and put out a plate of Vista Pak sandwich cookies or those almond ones shaped like windmills.  Bamp would sit in the rocking chair and tell stories while he smoked his pipe.  The evening ended when the story and his pipe tobacco ended at the same time.  He would repack the pipe if he was in the middle of a story.  If the story ended while his pipe still held any tobacco, he would begin a new story.  The ritual took hours, and few held on to the bitter end.  Those who had to get home would often come back the next night and request to hear one story or another early in the evening in order to learn how it ended.

The kitchen was far less elegant.  A tiny red and white table on rusting chrome legs and three red chairs were along the long wall; a four-burner gas stove filled the short wall at the end of the room.  On the other long wall was a sink and a refrigerator they had bought used in 1942.  It had been manufactured sometime in the late 1930s and had the motor on the top.  The refrigerator still ran just fine, a fact that was repeated anytime it was hinted that it might be time to replace it.

Everything in the tiny cottage attached to the large four-bay mechanic’s garage had a matte patina from the abrasion of coal dust.  The scent of burning coal was omnipresent and could be smelled even in the summer.  It is like no other scent, dry and crisp, with a warm, bitter hint.  My nostrils still stretch when I think of it, and my throat dehydrates from the memory of its swab.  

Maybe we didn't need anything today, but there were so many things I thought she had a right to have.  A new refrigerator, a new couch, maybe even a wall-to-wall carpet or a new winter coat.  Or a t-bone dinner at a restaurant or a new set of dishes.  She was living on $300/month Social Security, and she was only 58 and had a pace-maker.  Maybe it was enough now, but who knew what she might need and when?  I was secretly glad she was going to have any amount of that money Eddie could collect.

“Are you chilly, Mon’Lynne?” my grandmother asked a few hours after my uncle’s visit.

“Not really, Gram.” I said.  I was a little chilly, but not nearly enough to want to stoke up the furnace. “I can put on a sweater.  Want me to grab yours?”

“Well, I’m chilly.” She said. “Help me fix a fire.”

We trudged to the garage, and Gram pulled the wrapped wire handle to the door of the furnace, and I slid in a shovel of coal.

“I think that’s enough to take the chill off for tonight,” she said and tore strips of newspapers and tossed them on top. “Oh, we’re gonna need more kindlin' I think.”

I didn't think we did, but I reached for another newspaper just the same.

“Let’s not waste those,” she said. “What else we could we use?”  

She looked dead, straight into my eyes without blinking.  She looked beyond my eyes, in truth, to a place where she held a singular prerogative to communicate inside my core.  And, so I knew what she meant.  I started to ask, “Are you sure, Gram?” but she spoke before I could.

“Just go get ‘em.”

She’d already lit the fire before I returned with the dogged-ear cigar box, the dignified Indian on its lid burnished to near imperceptibility years ago.

“Open it,” she whispered the order.

I did, and she lifted out a handful of slips and let them fall from her open, out-stretched hand onto the blaze.

“Now it’s your turn.”

I looked into the box and felt a sense of awe and holiness as if it were the Ark of the Covenant, a metaphor that over the years has become less and less of an exaggeration.  It held more slips than were physically possible, literally hundreds of them, and their volume ballooned exponentially far, far larger than the size of the box once the lid was lifted.  The slips seemed to glow. They were all sizes and colors, some folded, some flat, some crinkled, some torn.  Neat handwriting, illegible scrawls, some with dates and amounts crossed off, some with lines and sums of columns.  Some with words or messages I didn't have time to read nor understand.

“Don’t look at them,” she said.  “Just turn the box over and let 'em land.”

We didn't speak.  We didn't touch.  We didn't weep.  We didn't laugh.  We just stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and watched them burn.  

As they curled and dissolved, I began to feel warm, but there was something strange about it, and I began to wonder about that.  Then, I realized the warmth was coming from the inside out, toward the fire and not from the fire.  I felt something I’d never felt before or at least not that way or to that extent.  I found myself looking for a word for the feeling.  I still look for that word.  The only word that came to me then is still the one that comes closest today.  I felt victorious. I felt calmly, solidly, victorious and utterly secure.

I understood things in that moment that I would forget again and again, however relentlessly life would remind me.  Each ember, each crackle, sparked a new understanding.  I understood how to have power over lack and status and greed.  I understood I simply needed to not believe in them.  I understood what Bamp meant when he told me before he died how life had given him more than anyone had ever wanted.  He had said that because it was absolutely true.  He died with all the end results of all the things everyone does to get what he had.  I understood why he said you were better off dying from starvation sharing your last crust of bread than dying with a full belly if someone else was hungry.  I understood why he was always kidding me to make sure I didn’t let all that book-learnin’ keep me from having good sense.  I understood what I really wanted to learn, what I really wanted to know.  I understood the difference between investing in what I wanted instead of ways to get what I wanted.  I understood how much we squander when we exchange our time here on Earth for the latter.  I understood that human pain decreases as sharing and decency become routine.

His cigar box was a nesting place of everything we need to end preventable human suffering.  Each slip was a testament to compassion and a willingness to sacrifice to make things better for others.  Each slip proved the senselessness of wealth and status in all that really matters.  Each slip eschewed praise or recognition for good deeds.  Each slip believed that everyone had the courage and the wit to do the right thing.  Each slip believed we could and would do it.  His cigar box was moral courage.  

My grandmother knew this too.  In some ways even more than he did, I think.  She poured me a cold glass of milk and gave me a couple of cookies once we were back inside.

“Those are the best cookies you've ever eaten, ain't they?”

“Yeah,” I said not all that surprised that she knew what I was thinking, “They really are.”

“You’ll sleep good tonight,” she smiled.

And, of course, I did.

Ending preventable human suffering is utterly possible.  It’s rather silly, if not an outright lie, to claim that it’s not.  We only need to decide we’d rather end suffering than acquire material things or feel superior and accomplished via some dim notion of success.  We simply need moral courage.  

Moral courage isn't a demonstration of sainthood by a marginalized avatar before a throng to later become martyred then canonized or bestowed some other secular equivalent.  It is the ordinary person whose name you will never know, who--past food, shelter, and treatment for illness or injury--couldn't care less about what one has; and yet is very concerned with what one can give.  The world is changed easily when a collective of such souls choose, despite the world’s contradictions, each day, no matter what, to give more, care more, speak out more, sacrifice more, and encourage others to do the same.

I've forgotten this lesson and lost my way many times.  I expect I will again.  I’m flawed.  I’ll need the rest of this life to approach understanding and grace.  But,  when I forget now and then or forget altogether,  my foolishness won't shrink its truth.  The truth of it will always remain available for those with a heart that seeks change.