Cold Spaghetti

Despite my instinct to hurl whenever I start to feel sappy, I was and am very Thankful for many things today.

I am thankful that my children are asleep without hunger or fear, that we have good health, love for each other, and a community that fills us with friends and opportunities to enrich our lives. What more could we ask?

In a world filled with unspeakable horrors and inhuman poverty, we are beyond blessed: we are among the most privileged on earth. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you are too. The Global Rich List is a quick way to check.

If we, then, are the world’s wealthiest people, do we have any social responsibility to those less fortunate? Any moral directive?

I’ve blogged about my own beliefs on these things before; John Donne still says it better than I ever could.

It’s been floating around for awhile that those in the lowest income brackets tend to give more in terms of total assets than those earning significantly more. The percentage of giving falls dramatically at the household earning level of $100,000 per year and does not rise again until you reach the ultra rich categories ( >$10 million/year).

Here’s another thought. Is giving something that one should do because it makes the giver feel better about them self? Or should one give because it’s something we all have a responsibility to do? Is caring for and about each other a goal to be met, or an aspect of what makes us human?

So as I am thankful for the peace within my household tonight, I think of those who do not have rest. This global recession will impact the most vulnerable the hardest. Even as we tighten our belts and hunker down for an uncertain future, shouldn’t we also be talking about what we can do to take care of others? Next year, I want to be thankful for peace in households outside of my own, in places in the world I’ve never been, with people I’ve never met.

This is a wonderful video clip from the fantastic PBS series “Unnatural Causes… is inequality making us sick?” One of the episodes, “Becoming American” was screened last night at the Ashe Cultural Center. I was one of the panelists that took questions about health inequalities at a community forum last night after the screening.

The website for the series is an incredible resource for anyone interested in income, race, immigration, housing, and the myriad of issues that influence our health. In particular, I liked the suggestions to how individuals can make strides in their own communities toward improving health. As a country, we showed we are ready for change… here are some suggestions on how we can start in our own backyards.

Research has shown that health is more than healthcare, behaviors, and genes—that the social
conditions in which we are born, live and work actually get under the skin as surely as germs
and viruses do. What can we do to help reframe the nation’s debate over health and to address
the root causes of our devastating socio-economic and racial health inequities?

Here are a few ideas you can use to get started and encourage others to become
involved in working towards health equity:

• Identify and connect people interested in the root causes of health inequities.
• Organize a “brown bag” screening to discuss how social conditions—where we
are born, live, work and play—impact health.
• Form a committee to identify assets, programs, or initiatives within your
organization where you can use the series to educate, organize or advocate for
health equity.
• Screen and discuss the series with PTAs, book clubs, neighborhood associations,
churches, tenants groups, racial justice groups, and trade unions.
• Identify three existing struggles in your community that can improve health equity,
e.g., land use, a living wage, paid sick leave, affordable housing mandates, toxic
clean-ups, lead paint removal, etc. How can you become a partner?
• Conduct an audit of health threats and health promoters in your neighborhood.
• Identify and build strategic partnerships with community-based organizations and
organizations in other sectors; link health outcomes to housing, education,
employment, political power and other arenas.
• Form a community-wide health equity coalition.
• Ask your public health department to conduct a Health Impact Assessment (HIA)
on proposed development projects and government initiatives and ordinances.
• Provide local media with facts and resources so they can incorporate a health
equity lens in their reporting; help them identify a message point person to provide
quotes, analysis and additional information.
• Broaden the discussion: look for opportunities to submit op ed articles, letters to
the editor, call in to radio talk shows, and form discussion groups.
• Organize a policy forum to brief officials in government agencies about the social
determinants of health inequities.

Paul came with me to the event last night (he was impressed that I managed to only use the phrase ‘epidemiologic assumption’ once) and regretted not having a video camera there. That can only mean that at some point in the evening, I picked my nose or something.

In lieu of my comments from last night, I’m listing a few of my thoughts based on the screening, the questions panelists were asked, and my comments…

— We should be very concerned about the mental health of the Latino youth in New Orleans. Statistically, their risks of mental illness far outweighs any other group in the city — and the risk factors we know to trigger illness in this group exist for them here in spades.

— What can we do, as a community, to create public, multiracial spaces?

— How can we advocate for better city transportation?

— What can be done to attract health researchers back to New Orleans?

All of these things are on the radars of the many community activists and organizations that are working to rebuild a better community here… but as anyone who works in community organizing and nonprofits understands, the strides made are more likely baby steps.  Can massive overhauling really occur?

Here is one community project that I think is great example of a fantastic step: The Hollygrove Market.  We have not been able to pick up the weekend box, but just knowing it is there for us and available in a neighborhood where food markets are scarce, makes me feel that maybe it is possible to create a healthy city in the midst of poverty and destruction?

h/t: Kate Harding

UPDATE: Stacy, you rock! YOU TOTALLY NAILED IT! Who can resist that catchy beat?

My PapPap Charlie was the only child of a rough, Swedish woman. He was well into his forties, unmarried, and childless when he met my divorced Grandma in their jobs at the Department of Commerce. He was quiet, having suffered great abuses as a POW during the Korean War, and whether due to this trauma or his peculiar personality, was incredibly socially awkward. He loved classical music almost as much as he adored my vivacious, life-of-the party Grandma, who seemed to be the light that saved him from his Charlie Brown-like days and thrust him into the wild world of our family. He died of a massive heart attack when I was 10, but my Grandma tells me that before he died, I won his heart.

Oblivious to the awkwardness he had with children, I embraced him with the all assumed adoration of a grandchild. I followed him around, chattering through the sounds of gentle classical music, invading his space when he went to be alone in his basement retreat. Years later, Grandma Betty would tell me that these were the highlights of his life. That he would sit perfectly still and simply listen, puffing away on his cigar, terrified of doing or saying anything that might offend and cause me to leave. He was in awe of me with absolutely no idea of what to do or say, so he simply sat and took in all my chatter and energy with patience and surprise.

Later, when Grandma Betty and I became roommates during my high school days, she filled these stories with more intimate ones about their marriage. Describing how he made her feel and the things that made their relationship special. My favorite antic dotes were the ones that showed Charlie’s softer side, the jokes that made my Grandma laugh. He had a dry humor with a curmudgeon twist, and like my own husband, made jokes from words.

For example, a historical time or place, to Charlie, was an** “hysterical” time or place. Gettysburg, or the Fourth of July, or the Declaration of Independence were all “hysterical” parts of U.S. History. He described the Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria, Virginia, the place where my Grandmother chose to have me, her first grandchild, baptized, as “a hysterical church.”

So when I approached the polls this morning and entered my vote, PapPap Charlie was foremost in my mind. I could not shake the thought of how hysterical the moment was, that I was casting a hysterical ballot on a hysterical day, a day that will go down in hysterics. I think about telling my grandchildren about what it was like to participate in the election of 2008, of getting to vote for the first Black President of our country. About how good it felt, as if our country and indeed, the world, was at a turning point and suddenly the winds were picking up to bring us back to a place of safety and honor. I wonder if they will be awed to think that I was a part of such a hysterical day.

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* Just in case someone wonder about the grammar here, I looked it up. Using ‘an’ before a word starting with the letter ‘h’ is reserved for when the word has a silent h sound… ‘an honor’, versus ‘a horse’.

** Okay, I know the rule. But really, doesn’t “an” just sound better??

—-

UPDATE: It seems my parents found the new blog. I know because they’ve called me several times a day over the past two days to dump on me offer rewrites for my posts. (Hi, Mom!)

My Grandma Betty was known to weave a few tails… and as the first grandchild and one who lived with her for a solid year to finish high school and then again off and on while I worked in the area after college… I was the one who heard her stories. Charlie worked a desk job in the Navy and never was a POW — these were Grandma’s embellishments. The whole thing is very Grandma Betty. I wonder if she wanted to jazz up his past for her own enjoyment, or to simply make a dull story more interesting, or if it was her way of making him seem more memorable to me. She knew early on that if anyone was going to keep our family stories alive, it would be me; Grandma was aware of the need to leave a verbal legacy through me.

So Grandma made up information about Charlie’s past. Really, I think it’s sweet. A testiment to how much she cared for him, that years after his death she would weave danger and mystery into the gentle, quiet, and reserved man she loved. So Charlie wasn’t a POW, he didn’t become ill in Korea (the story was that he contracted some type of illness and was denied medical attention while a POW), and had job with a Navy supplies department. That’s one story. The other one is of an ordinary man who was loved so much by a vivacious woman who saw him as her hero. That’s the story I like best.

Maybe she would have caught on earlier if she could see France from her house?

I haven’t been privvy to many calls between heads of state and potential heads of other states… but even if you forgave her missing the incorrect names of various Canadian officials, wouldn’t you start to get suspicious when the conversation decends into wife hotness, porn tapes, and dead animals?

The election has much of our attention these days.  The disbelief over the undecided (really, people, grow a pair), the shock over those who think Palin is just the best thing since sliced bread (wow, just… wow).  And now, after all the ‘Obama pals around with terrorists’ and ‘Obama hates white people’ and blahblahblah ridiculousness, the McCain campaign keeps throwing around socialism as if it’s some sort of anti-American voodoo.  Watch out for those socialists, folks.  They spit on apple pie, stomp on the American flag, and really, really hate baseball.

As a socialist, or at least a libertarian socialist, I admit that my feelings are a little bit hurt.  What in the world is so un-American about socialism?

Maybe my left-leanings come from the fact that I grew up in a socialist system: that of the US military.  You’d be hard pressed to find a better example of functional socialism: housing, universal health care, even shopping controlled outside of the ‘civilian’ system (no tax on military bases).   Still, the US military is a bit too authoritative for me; I am more of a fan of respecting individual liberties… which, doggone it, seems pretty much like pro-American values to me.

Of course this house is a pro-Obama house.  (I’m working very hard to hold any further snide comments on that issue.)  But it doesn’t mean that he’s my dream politician.  I am fascinated and excited that he has been able to bring people together, excite youth, and make a jaded grump like me feel that maybe there is a way out of this authoritative tunnel of doom we’ve been on for 8 years (I’d argue we’ve been on it since 1980, but that’s another story.)  The hope I have for the Obama mission of change is that he can slowly turn us around, so that our politics can find middle ground in a place that is truly center.  Then maybe us voodoo-welding anti-American socialists can come out and play.

Violet sent me this interesting video, and while watching it, the catchy title above caught my eye.  You see, I can’t resist the urge to recite “I am the Very Model of Modern Major General”.  Once I clicked over, the article itself was so fun and so very-meme worthy, that I couldn’t help but re-post it:

Are You the Very Model of a Modern Vice-President? (By Katha Pollitt)

From Salon’s War Room comes this quote of the day, from Iowa’s Lt. Gov. Patty Judge, a Democrat:

“Sarah knows how to field-dress a moose. I know how to castrate a calf. Neither of those things has anything at all to do with this election. But since we know so much about Sarah’s special skills, I wanted to make sure you knew about mine too.”

What cool things can you do that have nothing to do with being Vice President or, Lord help us, President? It doesn’t have to involve animal bloodshed. Can you write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform? I can’t, but I can whistle all the airs from that infernal nonsense, Pinafore. And leap tall buildings at a single bound. Plus, I’ve been to many foreign countries, to say nothing of New Jersey, which I can actually see from my house.

Maybe I should be Vice President!

Your turn.

Here’s my go:

I can recite the words to “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General,” in time, with appropriate breathing, for at least two verses (I’m not sure if I remember all the words to the third verse).  I can look into a field of clover and quickly spot 4, 5, 6 and yes, even 7(!) leafed clovers.  I can feed, dress, groom, and brush 2 children and have them out the door, on time, for school in less than 35 minutes.  AND, I have traveled extensively through Alabama and Mississippi and emerged every time with all of my natural teeth.

Maybe I should be Vice President, too!

Your turn?

(Anyone? Bueller?)

(True song begins around a minute in.)

Yesterday was Blog Action Day AND Love Your Body Day.

Augh!  Both things I wanted to blog about.  If this were back to the excuse letter, I’d say that I was at a Board Meeting last night for a nonprofit serving the under- and un-insured, and well, doesn’t that give me a little slack?  “No,” says the calendar.  Well, I’m not so good with following rules anyway, so here goes.

The theme for Blog Action Day was POVERTY and one of the reasons I felt compelled to write about it today is because of my great disappointment that no one spoke about it during the debate last night.  The issue of poverty is so dear, so important to me that I’ve thrown myself at three degrees, two schools, a hand-full of countries and a ton of work so that I could understand it better.  Here are two posts I’ve written in the past about poverty.  Global poverty — the fact that 1 in every 6 people on the planet lives on less than $1 a day — is one of the most important issues for us to discuss.  It impacts all of the other issues, things like terrorism, health, economics, and environment, that we are so concerned about in this election.

One thing that was discussed in last night’s debate that has A LOT to do with poverty are free trade agreements.  In particular, the candidate’s discussed the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which McCain supported and Obama (rightly) did not.  Obama very nicely summed up his reasons for not supporting the agreement: there were no environmental and labor protections in it.  The topic of free trade offers great entree to a discussion on poverty.

A Question: how do the free trade agreements supported and promoted by G8, IMF, WB, and most importantly the U.S. impact global poverty?

Answer: one heck of a lot, and not in a good way.

This article sums up the complex issues, ideologies, and major players very well.  It is an important read, because when summed up quickly and succinctly the bottom line goes something like this: The current form of free trade agreements are structured so that the wealthiest maintain solid advantage and the poorest are forced deeper into poverty.  Patricio Aylwin, former President of the Republic of Chile, said the following at the opening ceremony of the Thirty-first session of the FAO Conference where he was delivering the McDougall Memorial Lecture, in honor of Frank McDougall, one of the founders of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

“Only poverty has been truly globalized in our age. … The over-praised neo-liberalism and the omnipotent market is a mistaken vision and it is the root cause of some of the most serious problems that afflict us.“

Like many issues in global health, poverty, and development, there is no quick soundbite that can completely and accurately sum up the issue without sounding extreme.  In a take-my-word-for-it manner, I can sum it up in this way: free trade agreements offer opportunities and protections for multi-lateral corporations that extend far beyond issues of ‘trade’ (here is a video that discusses some of the non-trade issues involved — transcript); free trade agreements disproportionally impact women; free trade agreements further impoverish the rural poor; free trade is often tied to structural adjustment programs, which push countries deeper into neoliberal economic policies that further cripple their poor populations; and finally, that the economic ideologies that dominate World Bank, IMF, and G8 policies are misguided and misreported.  I included a few links that I felt offered relatively short and concise insight into those issues, although the true reading list into these issues is much greater in both length and density.

Instead of offering an economic debate (I spent a good 10 pages of my doctoral comprehensive exams on this, if you are really desperate on my own words), I thought I’d offer a personal account.

When I was working in Honduras in 2003 and 2004, I spent a lot of time traveling to remote villages in the mountains to talk to parteras (traditional birth attendants).  Many of these meetings were pre-arranged, with parteras coming from even more remote areas to gather supplies and attend the trainings and focus groups we conducted.  It was common for us to bring bags of USAID grain along for the ride to be distributed in these areas… bags of USAID grain, which had been grown and processed in the United States, and then shipped to remote farming communities in Honduras which were surrounded by fields of grain and legumes.  What was happening???  Well, the value of the food those farmers were producing had dropped considerably.  Families were forced to sell all that they could grow into order to survive… which meant that they had less food than they needed to live on.  So although they were growing food, they had to sell more and more of what they grew in order to survive — and in very real terms, one season of drought could literally destroy their family.  Their poverty wasn’t just a hard life, it was a live-or-die situation.  The economic forces of structural adjustment and free trade amounted to growth in the country’s export, yes — because families had to produce more in order to compete.  But at the cost of their own health and well-being.  International trade advocates and financial institutions would call this situation a success because of the increase in export goods. The cost to the poor is not part of their equation.

Delivering those bags was a huge reason I decided to go for the PhD in International Health and Development.  I realized in a very real and personal way that the ways in which we approached Global health and issues of poverty were skewed unfairly, and as a citizen of the United States, I felt obligated to at least try and do something about it.

Here are some pictures of us at a clinic delivering those bags in the mountains of north central Honduras (note the “USA” visable on the bags).

Following the lead of Alejna, who got it from Magpie, I will donate $2 to the International Forum on Globalization for every comment made on this post in the next 3 days (until Sunday at midnight — just in case others are late on this, too).

A day late, but better late than never.

After numerous failed attempts to upload it in whole to Google video, Paul shrugged his shoulders, chopped it in half, and put it up on youtube.  The second part overlaps a little with the first, I’m told.

Feedback is that it was a good interview.  I’ve sort of tried to see it once, but I’ve learned something… the agony of listening to myself speak is nothing when compared to the gripping torture of having to WATCH myself WHILE I speak.

Part One:

Part Two:

The “Greater New Orleans” interview airs tomorrow on WLAE channel 12 at 7 and 9:30 (and I think again at 2:30am?)  I feel certain that Paul will pull it from TiVo and put it online to ensure maximum embarrassment on my part; my parents pay him well to keep me tortured in this regard.