Where Have All the Woolly Bears Gone?

I haven’t seen any woolly bears yet this year, though they have always been around, walking up and down the driveway, after the fall equinox.  These little black and rust red caterpillars are supposed to tell the strength of the coming winter by the relative length of their central red and both ends black bands.  They probably do not—but they do freeze solid and hibernate through the winter that way, sometimes thawing out and moving around again after the first really cold days of fall.  They are supposed to be abundant through almost all of North America, so it is probably the unusually warm September that has kept them out of sight—but it makes me nervous when I cannot find the critters I expect to see.  Wikipedia is as good a source as any for these guys and the Isabella moths they become—see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrharctia_isabella.

 

When we moved to this house thirty-five years ago, the pond was full of frogs and tadpoles—big garumphing bullfrogs, slender leopard frogs, the singing peepers of spring (actually tiny tree frogs), and even a few toads.  Occasionally a tiger salamander would wander through, a good ten inches long and shiny black and yellow, reminding me of the seemingly endless tiny salamanders, including the fluorescently orange red efts, that I had watched and sometimes briefly imprisoned as a child in New Jersey.  We never touched the tiger salamanders, just watched them in amazement and wished them safe travels on their way, we imagined, to mate and spawn.  We probably have not seen a tiger salamander for twenty years, and the pond has gone from a loud bullfrog chorus that frightened city visitors and kept them awake in their beds to a single, infrequent jug-o’-rum.  The two boys who lived in the house before we bought it hunted bullfrogs with BB guns for after school snacks, and I have seen a muskrat catch and kill a bullfrog, too.  But in those years the bullfrogs never seemed to diminish. True, eastern Nebraska is at the extreme western edge of the bullfrog range (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_bullfrog), but they used to be here. Last year we could hear peepers on our neighbors’ larger pond, but none on our own, the first such silence in all our years here.  Even the year the pond dried up, the spring rains restored it and the tiny magic voices.  Perhaps it was something of the extraordinarily early and hot spring the year before that disturbed the peepers.  Bullfrogs, like woolly bears, are supposedly common and not endangered, and so are spring peepers, though apparently they have become rare in Iowa and Kansas, our abutting states.  (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_peeper)

 

Reading a memoir that included a few years on a beach in Staten Island immediately after WWI, I noticed the writer talking about the small pipefish and the many kinds of crabs she found in the tidal pools.  Spending summer vacations on a beach further out on Long Island after World War II, I remember the tidal pools, and their fascinating parade of small, dainty, darting creatures, but now the pools are gone from that beach, lost to the seawalls that have been built to protect the very pricey property from the storms of Long Island Sound.  The pipefish had already disappeared in my day—where now are the little crabs and starfish and other miniature monsters?

 

It is so easy not to notice any of these things.  My students are mostly unfamiliar with bullfrogs and even peepers.  They certainly could not tell you what pond was home to which, nor would they miss their sounds.  We know that there are world extinctions of amphibians, an ominous sign, since their moist and porous skins make them good barometers of every ecosystem’s health.  (See http://www.nzfrogs.org/Amphibian+Extinction+Crisis.html)  We also know that there are problems among the insects, the most ubiquitous of earth’s populations.  Monarch butterflies are declining precipitously (see http://www.press-citizen.com/article/20130916/NEWS01/309160020/Monarch-butterflies-facing-steep-decline) and honey bees are suffering “colony collapse”  all over North America (see http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought/), though the bee keepers at our local farmers’ markets seem to have healthy hives. 

So it may be that there is nothing to worry about in the decline of woolly bears and bullfrogs and peepers and pipefish from my life.  Maybe it is just normal variation or living on something approaching a continental divide of flora and fauna in the United States.  But it makes me sad and frightened.

Krishna and Gandhi and Walt and Ted

Tonight my students will sit down to write their responses to reading “The Bhagavad Gita According to Gandhi” and some will also watch the culminating episode of Breaking Bad.  Actually, there is a certain symmetry between the two texts.  The Gita is the central text of Hinduism, though that ethic is far less centralized than many other world religions.  The Gita is also the center of Gandhi’s teachings, the book he studied for inspiration throughout his amazing life.  During most of 1926, Gandhi was engaged in translating the Gita from Sanskrit into the Gujerati of his family and their neighbors in the vicinity of Bombay (Mumbai) and also in lecturing, almost daily, to his followers about its meaning.  (Order the 2009 English edition of the Gita and Gandhi’s commentary at http://www.amazon.com/Bhagavad-Gita-According-Gandhi/dp/B002C6TPYM/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1380571737&sr=1-2&keywords=gandhi%2C+gita%2C+strohmeier )  Gandhi explains that the Gita is “about” the human soul’s ability to attain self-realization through the renunciation of the fruits of one’s actions (xviii-xix). 

 

This is complicated, of course.  We are used to admiring radicals who proclaim that they will achieve their goal “By any means necessary.”  For Gandhi—and for Krishna, the avatar of the God Vishnu who expounds the philosophy of the Gita—this is irresponsible and self-deceiving.  Gandhi believed fervently in the cause of Indian independence and equality for all Indians, but he believed that it could only be attained by a principled following of right action.  For him this meant a non-violent refusal to cooperate with any kind of repression, whether from British rulers or from Indian nationalists who did not support the rights of all Indians.  He wrote, “The ideal of nonviolence had its origin in this realization–that when human life is full of suffering, we should cause suffering to none”  (Gandhi, 115).  There was nothing passive about Gandhi—like Krishna, he focused on the necessity of right action.  From a practical point of view, Gandhi was right.  India achieved its independence through non-violence.  Although some commentators have suggested this was only possible because the British were too nice to stamp out Gandhi’s non-violent adherents, research shows that non-violent revolutions have been more successful than violent ones throughout the 20th century and the beginning of the 21^st, no matter if the opposition governments have been “nice,” like the British, or “mean,” like the Indonesian government opposing independence for East Timor.  (See http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/IS3301_pp007-044_Stephan_Chenoweth.pdf)

 

Walter White, the antihero of Breaking Bad, on the other hand, is one of those “any means necessary” types.  He feels entitled to make sure that his family is provided for after his upcoming demise from cancer.  And, of course, he is right, too, or no one would watch the show.  No one “deserves” to die of cancer, even if you have smoked too much and otherwise abused your body or even just refused to eat your broccoli.  Everyone is supposed to take care of one’s family, though Krishna and Gandhi would say that even love of family is insignificant compared to acting in the right way whatever one does.  In fact, in the culminating episode, Walter even admits that he cooks meth because he likes doing it. (See http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/30/showbiz/breaking-bad-finale/)  According to Krishna and Gandhi, then, Walt is too devoted to the pleasure he takes in his actions.  Either way, we can see that Walt has slipped a cog somewhere, and his meth business is powerfully and irreparably evil.  In the Gita Krishna argues that sometimes killing someone else can be the right action, and that the soul is imperishable, so killing a human really is just providing a new home for that soul.  Gandhi, however, points out that killing or acting irresponsibly because the soul never dies is never a right action.  It is not justifiable to run a meth business and kill all one’s opponents.  Yet Walt’s incorrect premise, followed logically and relentlessly, has, like the Gita itself, an internal consistency that tends to mesmerize the viewer.  It should be enlightening to see how my students play these two texts against each other.

 

And then perhaps they will look around at society and wonder who approaches Walter White and who approaches Krishna and Gandhi.  Is American democracy too caught up in the two-gun John Wayne approach to justice and meaning to see Krishna and Gandhi as anything but rag-headed sissies?  (Not that either actually wears a turban . . . ) Or can the concept of right action without concern for the pleasure or the fruit of the action teach us anything?  Is it principled non-cooperation to close down government unless a law one dislikes is wrenched back from implementation?  Or is it a misappropriated sense of entitlement to have things one’s own way, despite the inevitability of sickness and death for all human beings?  Perhaps if Walt had had better health insurance and a social safety net to protect his family after he died, he wouldn’t have felt so entitled to cook meth.  Or at least viewers would not be so inclined to cut him a break on his truly vicious actions.   My guess is Senator Ted Cruz is more likely to be watching Breaking Bad tonight than to be reading the Gita, but he could learn more from Krishna and Gandhi than from Walter White. 

 

Prison Writing

I was out at the women’s prison today for our Words from Within writers’ circle.  The group has been going for eight years now, and we have self-published four little chapbooks, of which I am extravagantly proud.  Although we have had some very good writers in the group, I think of it most as “for” those women who are just beginning to recognize that they have a right to their own thoughts and feelings.  Lisa, the woman sitting to my right today, is now the veteran of the group.  We used her essay as the closing piece in our second chapbook.  “Today I . . . have come to realize I have an opinion. . . . and today, reading this out loud in front of you all has been great therapy for me on more than fear to read in front of others.”  Yes, writing can help someone see that she does have an opinion and a right to express it.  A woman shouldn’t have to come to prison to realize that, but at least the breakthrough happened for her, both in the composition class where she originally wrote the piece and in the writing group where she was able to workshop it some more.

 

Jimmy Santiago Baca is probably America’s most successful “prison poet.”  (See http://www.californiapoetics.org/reviews/2364/a-place-to-stand-jimmy-santiago-bacas-docu-memoir-is-scheduled-for-release-this-spring and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odE6Io-DEAE) In his memoir, A Place to Stand, he wrote

Language gave me a way to keep the chaos of prison at bay and prevent it from devouring me; it was a resource that allowed me to confront and understand my past, even to wring from it some compelling truths, and it opened the way toward a future that was based not on fear or bitterness or apathy but on a compassionate involvement and a belief that I belonged (5). 

Wow!  That is maybe the most beautiful thing anyone has ever said about language. As a teacher and a writer, it blows me away.  But as someone who works with people in and out of prisons, it means even more.  I see so much “fear and bitterness and apathy”; I see the ways they entitle people to think they must reoffend.  And what I want, and see in the people who succeed on the outside, is exactly that “compassionate involvement and belief that I belonged,” something you can see Lisa working toward in her essay.

 

For more than thirty years, Richard Shelton has run one of the most successful prison writing programs in the country, turning out professional poets as well as engaging people like Lisa to write through pain and confusion, to keep the chaos at bay, and to confront and understand the past. (See http://richardwshelton.com/My_Books.html andhttp://richardwshelton.com/About_Me.html)  Toward the end of his memoir, Crossing the Yard:  Thirty Years as a Prison Volunteer, Shelton suggests that what American prisons need is volunteers willing to come and teach a skill—whether it be literacy or plumbing or computers or music or . . . (pp. 221-22).  Some corrections officers resent volunteers.  “Why do you come teach poetry to them and not to us?” is often implicit—and sometimes explicit—in their interaction with me and my various teaching partners.  My escort at the men’s prison on Thursday night explicitly told me that the guys present a different face to the guards than to the volunteers, implying that the inmates only fake interest to impress the visitors.  Some do.  But  then, counselors tell participants in  recovery circles to “Fake it till you make it,” to practice new behaviors until they replace old bad habits.  So whether prison writing groups help people like Jimmy and Lisa use writing to understand and pace themselves, or whether it is merely a temporary exploration of positive behaviors, they do give people the space and impetus to change in a good way. 

 

As state prison expenditures continue to soar, states cut back education and vocational training to save money.  They focus more and more on keeping order within the prisons themselves, even if that means inmates exit prisons less able to live in free society than when they originally committed their crimes—a result no one wants.  The people in prisons are, like everyone else, a mixture of good and bad, reflecting the forces that have shaped them over time. I like watching someone like Lisa develop, love watching over and over What I Want My Words to Do to You, a video of an enormously successful prison writing project led by Eve Ensler (see http://www.pbs.org/pov/whatiwant/) , appreciate Baca’s rich language and vivid imagery.  Working with prison writers is an inspiration for me.  I’m perfectly aware a good poet can be a dangerous person—one need only look at Lord Byron, not to mention Norman Mailer’s protege, Jack Abbott (see http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/10/specials/mailer-abbot.html), who managed to reoffend and take another man’s life after being released, partly at Mailer’s insistence.  But I also know, very personally, the men and women who have grown through their writing.  And I would far rather welcome them back into my neighborhood than I would someone whose prison experience had been based on aversion and manipulation rather than learning to come to terms with oneself and the world.  Wouldn’t you?

 

Former Kids in Prison

Last week our local newspaper, the Lincoln Journal-Star,  ran three articles about prison populations, one about reevaluating good time laws in response to an alleged murder spree by a recently released inmate, one about the death of an inmate who had assaulted an officer, and one about the need for services for inmates who finish their sentences and leave prison.  A fourth story tells about a conference intended to reform the treatment of children with trauma so that they do not grow up with insupportable pain, like the men in the first two stories.  But all four stories had the same subtext: Our prisons are doing a miserable job of creating a safer society.

 

Yup.  No doubt about that!  Nikko Jenkins, the young man accused of four murders in ten days, had been in and out of trouble with the law since he was only seven years old.  He told everyone who would listen he was mentally ill, but a state psychiatrist said he was faking his symptoms.  So—he got out of prison, and, apparently, he shot people.  (See http://www.omaha.com/article/20130908/NEWS/130908898‎)  Robert Carter, a man who also had had a long struggle with mental illness and the law—“He was behind the eight ball from birth,” a mentor said (see http://journalstar.com/news/local/911/inmate-who-assaulted-guard-dies/article_c20812bb-1336-5c57-b600-86de0f5df759.html )—lashed out at an officer escorting him on a hospital visit and cut him with a butter knife.  Carter was already in hospice care, and he died within the week.  Friends have told me that he was probably hallucinating or suffering a flashback when he attacked his guard.

 

The services that we, as a state and as a society as a whole, give to at-risk children are not working.  No child chooses to be born to addicted parents, nor to be abused, nor to be bounced from one foster family to a group home to a third and a fourth and a fifth placement.  We know such a child has a great probability of ending up in prison, but we act as if it is his fault.  Punishment is the last thing he needs—in fact it is pretty much all he knows. (See http://journalstar.com/news/local/brain-science-effects-of-childhood-trauma-prompt-changes-in-child/article_306f12bd-4532-5646-902f-71de4a6ef984.html)  Nebraska Health and Human Services is trying to reorganize to do a better job with the children, but there are still a lot of former children in Nebraska’s prisons, which are 50 % over capacity.  Cutting good time rules that allow inmates to essentially halve their sentences by behaving reasonably well in prison is the kneejerk reaction when someone like Nikko Jenkins apparently reoffends, but we cannot afford such cuts either in money or in the lives of those inmates who really want to do better.  Executing Jenkins, as the governor has suggested, might get rid of one prisoner but has shown itself to be useless in terms of curbing crime.  Not to mention that it is a little gross that the state recognizes no responsibility for taking a seven-year-old and turning him into a monster.  “Off with his head!”  Scapegoating will not solve the problem.

 

When I come into one of the Nebraska men’s prisons for a meeting of a self-improvement club, I talk to the men, notice who is called for meds, and hear about the people who are not present and even those who never join clubs.  Clubs, hobbies, classes, even religious meetings, have all been severely curtailed—eliminated or cut by 50 to 75%–but they are the things that we know, both intuitively and experientially, actually socialize people for moving back into society without reoffending.  Men like Carter and Jenkins apparently need more than the clubs, need extensive psychological and behavioral treatment and, as Public Safety director Tom Casaday says (see http://journalstar.com/news/local/911/casady-inmates-need-more-services/article_7a2ede2e-c01c-5cf6-9156-7a4d891eba23.html ), need help in finding a job, housing, and aftercare treatment on the outside.  Letting someone do unproductive time while he is mentally ill and then shoving him out on his own with no support system is a lousy plan, unless the point is to assure a steady stream of recidivists moving back to prison.  Might be a nice job security pattern for people working in corrections, but it would take a very cynical person to think it was a good idea.

 

Let’s keep good time.  Let’s even enhance it.  Let’s figure out ways to reward inmates who genuinely work toward their own healing, realizing that almost all of them are traumatized and have learned that manipulation works better than honesty and trust in the world that brought them to prison.  Encourage the clubs.  Encourage outside volunteers who are willing to teach useful skills such as literacy or plumbing or drug and alcohol counseling.    Encourage vocational and academic education.  Mandate that no one be released without some sort of provision of parole, so that structure and discipline support each ex-con’s reentry into society.  Punishment for the sake of punishment and doing time for the sake of doing time is wasteful.  Rehabilitation and treatment are useful.  For the sake of public safety, locking up people who prey on other people is useful—but the goal even then should be to try to return them to safe functioning among us all.  The US has more prisoners, both proportionately and in absolute numbers, than any other country in the world, which must mean either that Americans are the worst people in the world, or that something is very wrong with the system.  If we want to claim that we are humane people, we need to heal the former children who were failed by our child protective services system.  And if we want to live in a safer society, we need to rehabilitate the people who have offended against us all with crimes of violence.  Punishment may be part of the process, but it is not a logical goal in itself.  Provide extensive mental health treatment and realistic drug and alcohol abuse programs.  Shorten sentences and make sure ex-cons have the means to succeed.  We will all live better for it.

Twelve Years After

Twelve Years After

 

            If we become a more fearful, aggressive and vengeful society, then the terrorists will have won.  If we divide among ourselves, judging one another by religion or skin color or accent, then the terrorists will have won.  If we respond to this assault on freedom by sweeping aside protections for civil liberties, for other species, and for the soil and water and air; if we respond to violence by becoming more violent, stockpiling weapons, dropping bombs on civilians—then the terrorists will have won.

                                                                                                Scott Russell Sanders (2001)

 

            Sanders wrote this paragraph only a week after the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.  His essay is one of more than 125 collected in September 11, 2001:  American Writers Respond, edited by William Heyen (To order a copy, click here:http://www.amazon.com/September-11-2001-American-Writers/dp/0971822808/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1378431166&sr=1-1&keywords=heyen%2C+September+11)

            If Sanders is right, the terrorists have won.  Americans in general certainly became more fearful after 9/11, though that may be fading now. America’s aggression against Iraq—which had nothing to do with the hijackings—was vengeful and not particularly advantageous to anyone.  We are certainly more divisive politically, and that extends to questions of race, immigration status, and, to the extent that issues such as gay marriage are debated in faith terms, religion.  Whistle blowers reporting on invasions of privacy by national security forces, and the absolute persecution of the whistle blowers who got caught, are ugly.  The enthusiastic embrace of “fracking” and bitumen mining to achieve “energy independence” does not bespeak protection for the soil and water and air, not to mention ourselves and other species of living beings.  Do we even have any idea how many bombs the US has dropped on civilians in the last twelve years of the “wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq?  Or how many casualties they caused? 

 It could have been worse—a rumor was circulating (maybe still circulates) in US prisons that in the event of invasion, all prisoners would be slaughtered to avoid their becoming the nucleus of an insurrection or civil war.  That did not happen.  The writ of habeas corpus was not suspended, as it was during the Civil War.  Perhaps the planners of the attack were such astute observers of Americans that they predicted America would rush to war, destroy trillions of dollars of its capital, and fail as a nation.  They were only correct on the first two points. The draft was not resumed, though that may have been a mistake, because it has increasingly isolated pro-war rhetoric from those who actually serve in the military.  And as a nation, the slow process toward gay and lesbian rights, the abolition of the death penalty, the protection of children, and other human rights reforms has continued, despite our divisiveness.  Perhaps the nation has even come to see that the attacks of 9/11 were not really that different from the kind of terrorist attacks that have plagued most other parts of the world.  We are not on an island, magically protected from violence and hatred.

            In Blackfoot tradition, death came into the world so that we should pity each other, and for a time the fallen towers, the acrid smoke, and the thought of the first responders who walked upward into the doomed buildings, frantically trying to save lives before the buildings came down, did inspire us to pity and to love.  But anger and vengeance ultimately won out, at least in terms of official US policy.  Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 150 years old, presents the Civil War as a Christ-like blood sacrifice that will enable America to achieve an everlasting life, or at least to “long endure.” The devastation of 9/11 seems to be moving toward a similar ritual meaning, and it is probably unfortunate that we have fallen into familiar rhetorical patterns.  Many Americans were, rather incredulously, asking twelve years ago “Are the attackers crazy?  Why else would they hate us? Do they just envy our freedom?”  Many voices, including some particularly perceptive ones in the Heyen book I quoted from above, answered, accurately, that American colonialism had resulted in death and a loss of freedom in other parts of the world.  Not to mention a resentment for the kind of smarmy-ness that is so self-unaware as to have to ask “Why do they hate us?” when living in a country that hogs a disproportionate share of the world’s resources. True, justified resentment does not justify the infliction of mass death on civilians, but knowing why something happened is a part of healing.  Crime victims often ask “Why me?”  And an honest answer—whether they were in some way complicit in the attack or truly innocent victims–helps them deal with what happened.

            I’m sorry that, as a nation, despite insightful and honorable exceptions, we have fallen back to our comfortable sense of being confirmed by our blood sacrifice as the salvation nation and are not asking, with great intensity, “No, really.  Why DO they hate us?”

 

Shall We Bomb Syria?

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So—Shall We Bomb Syria?

 

            The worst thing about being a Super Power is holding back when you want to act.  Nations that are brave and weak know about holding and folding.  Nations that are strong feel that they have a right to act.  So—should the US bomb Syria in order to stop its government from using nerve gas against its own people?  One wants to say of course—no one wants to see little kids, or even adult soldiers, convulsing and dying.

            But a lot of harm has been done in the name of humanitarianism.  And a lot of action that could have saved lives has been foregone, as in Rwanda.  I have been reading Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy (two books published so far, see http://www.amitavghosh.com/index.html) .  The second book ends in 1839, right before the war Britain fought to impose free trade in opium upon China.  It’s a most absorbing read, with an engrossing set of characters, some fictional and some “real.”  John Slade, for instance, was the actual editor of the Canton Register, and some of his archived editorials and articles make it into the second Ghosh novel, River of Smoke. 

            Britain certainly had some impressive humanitarian chops in the 1830s.  William Wilberforce had led the campaign to abolish slavery in the British Empire and saw his Act pass only three days before he died in 1833. ( See http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/wilberforce_william.shtml ).  He may have had his faults—he did want to save India from its “heathen” religions– but he really did change the world for the better.  The humanitarianism of the opium merchants and their apologists was of another sort.  They hail the power of Free Trade to save the Chinese masses for the Mandarins and to allow them to choose opium—despite the strong objections of most Chinese to what they see as an insidious drug—and Christianity.  (Was Marx listening to this debate?  Was he quite literal in talking about religion as the opiate of the masses?)  The arguments of John Slade for the freedom to choose opium are strangely similar to those of the Canadians in Manitoba, especially the journalist John Christian Schultz (see http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/schultz_john_christian_12E.html), who wrote three decades later that the Metis and other fur trade families should be freed of the despotism of the Hudson Bay Company by being annexed to Canada.  Neither Slade nor Schultz even bothered to consult the Chinese or the Metis, let alone listen to them, on the subject of “freedom.” “Humanitarianism” hides quite a lot, even when those who speak in its name are closer to Wilberforce than to Slade or Schultz.

            Ghosh clearly hates the opium trade and the way it abuses both the Chinese consumers and the Indian farmers who are coerced into giving up their traditional food crops for the tricky and inedible poppies.  Syria is harder to fathom, especially as we do not have the wisdom of hindsight.  Violence is often a quick answer, but rarely the right one.  It is braver to sit there and do nothing than to do the wrong thing, especially when we have a history of doing so many wrong things.

Anniversaries

            This August we are celebrating the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” dream speech.  Seven years after that speech, on August 17, 1970, a young Omaha, Nebraska, policeman, Larry Minard, was killed responding to a 911 call.  Two local Black Panthers, Mondo we Langa (then known as David Rice) and Ed Poindexter, were arrested for rigging and planting the bomb that killed him.  They are still serving life sentences.  Which might be appropriate, had they actually made or planted any bombs.

            The summers of 1968, 1969, and 1970 were marked by racial tension across the United States.  A teenaged Black girl, Vivian Strong, had been shot in the back and killed by Omaha police in 1969, and Mondo and Ed were among the most successful of the new generation of Black activists who both demanded rights and worked intelligently behind the scenes to build better relations between the Black community and the police and to strengthen the Black community by providing things like school breakfast programs for poor children.  Meanwhile, the FBI’s COINTELPRO group was trying to destabilize the Panthers, American Indian Movement (AIM), La Raza, and other protest movements that were empowering the poor and minority communities in the US.  COINTELPRO brought about the death of Fred Hampton, Chicago Black Panther leader, and the imprisonment of Leonard Peltier, from AIM.  Shirley Douglas, the mother of Kiefer Sutherland, was framed and arrested California, allegedly for procuring explosives.  She was working with the Panthers on school breakfast programs.  Charges were quickly dropped, however, when the FBI realized her father was the influential and highly respected Canadian Parliamentary leader, Tommy Douglas.

            The bomb making charges leveled against Mondo and Ed were not dropped.  In their case, there was not a conspiracy but an actual crime, and a young policeman was dead.  Despite intensive Freedom of Information Act requests by Nebraskans for Justice, an ad hoc defense group for Mondo and Ed, and attempts to gain them a retrial after the tape of the crucial 911 call that led to Officer Minard’s death first disappeared and then reappeared , it is not clear what happened.  The most likely theory is that COINTELPRO hired a group of brothers to produce a bomb and call 911, hoping to frame the influential young Black Panthers for conspiracy charges.  Something went terribly awry, and the bomb went off, turning the conspiracy into an actual murder. 

            It’s hard to admit that the FBI framed and murdered innocent American citizens.  Mondo is a friend of mine, so don’t just believe me.  Look for yourself.  Check out the BBC documentary available on You-Tube in three parts at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi0luaq0eyMhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi0luaq0eyM  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwHfzQqpMS8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwHfzQqpMS8http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPFUzv-PSK8

Also look at the stories about the “Omaha Two” at  http://www.examiner.com/article/omaha-police-officer-kills-14-year-old-vivian-strong-triggering-race-riot

Find out about Fred Hampton at http://www.democracynow.org/2009/12/4/the_assassination_of_fred_hampton_how 

and Leonard Peltier at http://www.freeleonard.org/case/ and Shirley Douglas at http://www.windsorscottish.com/pl-actors-sdouglas.phphttp://www.windsorscottish.com/pl-actors-sdouglas.php  

If you live in Nebraska, you have been paying taxes since 1970—or since you were born or came to Nebraska—to imprison guys Amnesty International considers to be political prisoners.  You probably want to know about that.  And if you are an American from any state, you probably want to know about that.  And if you are anywhere in the world celebrating the “I Have a Dream” speech, well, that dream isn’t going to come true while Mondo and Ed are imprisoned.  And if you believe that King was a whiner and American Blacks ought to be satisfied to live in this nation, you might learn something from the story of Mondo and Ed, too.  

Introduction

Psychopaths are really pretty rare.  Most people, if they have the chance, and especially if it is just as easy,  would rather do good than harm.  Trouble is, there is an awful lot of stuff to know.  That’s why “do-gooders” have a bad name, I think.  Often they do not really understand the parameters of what they are doing, like the woman who stopped to revive the man passed out, face-down in the middle of the street.  He rolled over and said, “Lady, I don’t know what you are doing, but I’m holding the light for this guy down the manhole.”  More often, the people around them don’t know why they are doing what they are doing.  Even in the North in the 1840s, Abolition seemed like a bad idea to most white people.

For nearly 40 years, I’ve taught University level classes about Native American (First Nations) studies and the literature of place, mostly the Great Plains.  For about 20, I have volunteered in the prisons in my home state of Nebraska.  Universities and prisons are both places where you learn stuff.  My prison friends have a pretty good idea about what my students are like, but my students are mostly ignorant about my prison friends.  That’s why many of them are excited about coming to the prison with me.  My students are mostly ignorant about Native American issues, too.  They are surprised to find out how Native people are mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, or in what ways Abraham Lincoln (for whom our university’s city was named ) was entangled with Native issues.  Often they end a class asking “Why didn’t anybody tell us this before?”  Several years ago, a computer studies student who just needed one more elective class to graduate signed up for Native American lit on a whim.  At the end of the semester, he said he felt as if he were about to change lanes when he suddenly spied a car in his blind spot.  That’s a scary feeling, but our society, despite a million ways to find information, is full of blind spots.

After nearly forty years, I don’t feel as if I am being a very effective blind spot remediator.  Students who could be the grandchildren of my original students are coming into my classes as clueless as their grandparents were, and fewer are even signing up for classes in ethnic or environmental studies as my university and our world deemphasize such things.   And that bothers me, because I’m one of those really passionate do-gooder types who lives to make the world a better place.  (“Take us for more walks,” my dogs say.)  I am going to use this blog to let people “know what” is happening on issues that no one has ever told them about but that are important for us all–and about which I think I have something knowledgeable and maybe even interesting to say.