Politics & Causes Archives - Page 8 of 45

caregiving/General interest/Health/Healthcare/Medicine/Optimism Collection/physicians/Politics & Causes/San Francisco/USA

November 12, 2016October 20, 2021

On Being a Blessing

by Fran Johns

There was an invisible pall hanging over the banquet hall.

An annual feel-good celebration of a cherished cause, the room was filled with friends and supporters of the San Francisco Free Clinic. The Clinic offers medical care for the uninsured; the pall had to do with the new President-Elect’s pledge to increase the ranks of those uninsured by unknown millions by immediately repealing the Affordable Healthcare Act.

For 23 years, SFFC supporters have filled the same banquet hall. The annual event, initiated by the late San Francisco investor/philanthropist Warren Hellman and his wife Chris, generates the entire budget for SFFC’s operation. Not coincidentally, the San Francisco Free Clinic was founded 23 years ago by the Hellmans’ daughter and son-in-law, Tricia and Richard Gibbs, two young physicians who decided to throw over the prospects of their lucrative medical practices in favor of starting a free clinic for the growing ranks of uninsured in need of quality medical care.

(Full proud disclosure, this writer and her husband have been supporters of the Free Clinic since its opening day.)

A highlight of the annual event has always been brief closing remarks from the host, and after Hellman’s death, this task fell to the Drs. Gibbs. This year, Richard Gibbs said a few words and then turned the podium over to his wife.

“One thing I have now learned,” she said, “is never to write a speech the day before an election.” She went on to explain how the Free Clinic has made incremental progress in its mission every year since its founding, and she had prepared remarks about that narrative with the expectation that this would continue. With the election of Donald Trump, though, comes the realization that the story of ongoing progress – Clinic staff not only provide care, they regularly guide clients into finding affordable insurance – will encounter a speedbump. Acknowledging that many in the room probably voted for Mr. Trump, and that politics would be inappropriate to the event, Gibbs said she still had wanted to find a way her remarks could be relative and upbeat.

So she turned to the story of Abraham. Gibbs is a serious student of the Torah, and would not have had to spend extra time on recalling that story. She noted that Abraham’s narrative was not incrementally always upward, but had its own speedbumps.

“God told Abraham to be a blessing,” she said. “And I realize that’s what we can do. You are all a blessing to (the Free Clinic.) We can all go out and be a blessing.”

For election week in California, it was a reassuring thought.

crime/General interest/Gun control/Law/Media/Religion/San Francisco

November 3, 2016

Ben McBride on Peacemaking 101

by Fran Johns

Just when peace for violence-prone communities seems an impossible dream – along comes Ben McBride.

Ben McBrdie

McBride, who merges the zeal of a Baptist youth leader with the practicality of 15 years as an advocate for community peace and justice, believes that dream can become a reality. Not tomorrow – but soon enough to believe in it. One evidence of his belief is in the fact that some eight years ago he moved his family (a wife and three daughters) into an Oakland, CA neighborhood tough enough to have won the title of the “Kill Zone.” The idea was to understand firsthand the root causes of gun violence. They have occasionally had to leave town briefly when one group or another was exceptionally angry, but they’re still there.

And gun violence is actually down. This is in part due to McBride’s blatantly walking both sides of the street – as a civilian trainer for police, and a community activist for oppressed groups. The double life has its problems. As a central figure with a group that linked arms to stop traffic on the Bay Bridge one busy afternoon he drew the ire of both law enforcement agencies and his own father, whose career was in transportation. (McBride tells of committing a minor offense as a teenager and asking the responding officer to “take me to jail, just don’t take me to my father.” His father has mellowed after seeing his children reach law-abiding adulthood.) But when community organizers see him hired to work with police, they often consider it a betrayal. In reality, McBride walks both sides convinced that they can come together in the middle.

McBride spoke recently on “Crossing the Street: The Power of Peacemaking,” one of a series of programs on “Waging Peace” at Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco. Much of the talk was concerned with what he terms “the theology of resistance” – as in resisting injustice.

“Sawubona,” McBride said – having his audience repeat the word several times – “is the Zulu word for hello. The traditional reply is Sikhona.” The expanded meaning of the words is central to resisting injustice, he added. “Sawubona literally translates “I see you.” Sikhona means, “Because you see me, I am here.” The business of seeing “the other” with as few lenses, or filters, as possible goes to the heart of McBride’s peacemaking message. ben-mcbride-1

Peacemaking, he argues, requires “disrupting my point of view with ‘the other’s point of view. It is about stepping into the middle of the tension.”

Opportunities to get groups like community protesters and law enforcement officers to meet in the middle of the tension without violence are few, and fraught. McBride has been called to places like Ferguson where tensions have long simmered – and already exploded. But his ability to see the perspectives of opposing sides boosts his ability to defuse.

McBride’s lay audiences – this recent one consisted of 40 or so individuals of differing ages, ethnicities and views – rarely have an opportunity to fully inhabit either side of such tensions. But considering how to see “people closer to pain than we are” makes the middle of the street at least a less threatening place to stand. And having the husky, smiling McBride standing there too wouldn’t ever be a bad idea.

Arts/California/Entertainment/General interest/Lifestyle/Media/Politicians/Politics & Causes/San Francisco/seniors/Sports/USA/Women

October 26, 2016

Age, Agility and National Stamina

by Fran Johns

It is a little known but verifiable fact that this writer is a graduate of Circus 101. Well, I completed the course, that is, some five or six decadespast my turning-cartwheels-in-the-backyard days.

This comes to mind because of all the recent stamina talk. At the time of my circus experience I was several years younger than the current candidates for president of the United States. I am still the age of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and frankly, Justice Ginsberg and I (I am not officially authorized to speak for my 1933-babe sister) resent the stamina talk. She, of course, is making her debut (speaking only, opening night) with the Washington National Opera this year; I’m afraid opera performance is not on my bucket list. But still.

Stamina-wise there is at least the circus thing. As I recall, my late-life circus experience began with an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a class offered by the San Francisco School of Circus Arts (now Circus Center) titled Circus 101. It sounded interesting, and at least worth undertaking for a good story. So I called the Circus School.

“Could a reasonably flexible 60-something woman be eligible to take your Circus 101 class,” I asked the nice lady at the other end of the line? She replied, essentially, if you’ve got the money we can work you in. “You can set your own limits,” she said.

So I showed up for the first class, raising the median age by two or three decades, and quickly learned my limits: upside-down is not for 60-somethings. Oh, I could still do upside-down, headstands with my feet on the wall or the occasional cartwheel; but then I tended to get dizzy and throw up, which is not in the curriculum. I found I was very good, though, at balancing the peacock feather on my chin and at being part of the human pyramid; I always got to be the top of the pyramid because nobody wanted to step on the little old lady. I was also quite good at the Ooze – a sort of backward roll-over with a collapse at the end.

In my class was a lovely Chinese-American girl named Yvonne, who measured approximately 24-18-24 and could juggle three balls before we even started. By the second class her husband Ken had been talked into joining. Ken and Kit, another husky young man who showed up at the same time, could perform great feats of strength and skill, but because they had all those muscles getting in the way I could beat them at grabbing my ankles and doing bend-overs and such that they couldn’t even approximate – which made me feel initially quite superior.

All feelings of superiority quickly disappeared. We learned the egg roll, the diablo and the rola-bola, that last being a balancing act on a board set on a large pipe, which when circus people do it looks easy as pie. It is not. (Nor is juggling four balls.)

I did discover that I really shone at the human caterpillar. This begins with a base person on all fours (hands and feet, not knees.) The next person rests on top of the base person, feet crossed, hands on the floor, and additional caterpillar people are similarly arranged. The rear legs and all hands move in unison, theoretically, until somebody giggles.

Is any of this relevant to today’s world, nearly two decades later? Well, it provides food for thought and some great metaphors.

One can only hope that everyone on the political spectrum will have the stamina – not to mention agility – required for running the country at all levels and branches of government. And that our collective community can master the rola-bola without turning into one great Ooze.

General interest/journalism/Media/Politics & Causes/San Francisco/USA/World Affairs

October 13, 2016October 13, 2016

Nuclear-free World? Possibly. Some Day

by Fran Johns

Aaron Lobel (r) and Philip Yun at Ploughshares event

Ploughshares Fund supporters – Americans committed to reducing nuclear stockpiles, preventing new nuclear states, and increasing global security – recently got some encouraging words from a few of those on the front lines. Not that the goal of a nuclear-weapons-free world is near, but that it’s a lot closer than 35 years ago.

It was 35 years ago that Ploughshares founder Sally Lilienthal, a 62-year-old sculptor, human rights activist, mother and wife, gathered a few friends in her San Francisco living room to discuss what could be done to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons here and abroad. This was the year (1981) when Ronal Reagan unveiled a “strategic modernization program” which called for – among other things nuclear – thousands of additional warheads, a significant increase in bomber forces, including 100 B-lBs and the development of stealth bombers, a new land-based 10-warhead strategic missile (the MX), and new intermediate-range missile deployments in Europe. In addition, he proposed deploying more than 3,000 air-launched cruise missiles on bombers.

There may not be a lot of peace on earth today, but there are far fewer nuclear threats to that eventual possibility and Ploughshares Fund is one key reason why.

A group of longtime Ploughshares supporters gathered recently in San Francisco to hear about ongoing work in South Asia, where India and Pakistan have a combined total of 250 nuclear weapons at the ready – enough to create a catastrophe in the area and long-term distress across the planet if that conflict were to escalate. America Abroad Media, a Ploughshares grantee, is working to prevent such a catastrophe.

AAM founder and president Aaron Lobel was interviewed by Ploughshares Executive Director and COO Philip Yun on how media fits into the complex efforts to reduce global conflict, specifically in South Asia. “You can go back to the origins of Pakistan as a Muslim state,” Lobel says, “and the question of whether India even recognizes Pakistan’s legitimacy” to get a picture of the enormity of the problem. But media in the area gets large audiences and builds human bonds. AAM works through public radio, international town halls, documentary and news programming and other avenues to build a civil society.

“We continue to believe that a civil society ultimately makes a difference,” Lobel says; “media is just one part of it.” And can such a society exist, and make a difference, in areas like South Asia today? “Absolutely yes,” says Lobel. “The lawyers’ movement in Pakistan did make a difference; and there are people in the civil society (there) involved in moving the ball forward.”

Lobel spoke at length of AAM’s work in Afghanistan, where its media following included the president of the country for at least one program. “If the president watched,” one questioner asked, “how many others actually saw the program?” “A lot,” says Lobel. “People gather around a satellite TV in the villages – this is not like having dozens of channels and TV sets in every home.” world-peace

Ploughshares president Joseph Cirincione addressed the gathering on the broader issues, and the global outlook today. “In order for these guys (countries with smaller nuclear stockpiles) to give up nuclear weapons” Cirincione says, “they’re going to have to see the big guys doing it – and that’s not happening. We have to address the underlying issues (such as) water issues and religious issues. We also have to address the fundamental distrust. It’s important to recognize the power of media in addressing these issues to create a more peaceful world.” (“We fund the smartest people,” Yun adds, “with the best ideas.”)

Despite the discouraging prospects for global peace just now, Cirincione had a few nuggets of good news for the Ploughshares supporters:

“There were 70,000 nuclear weapons when we started,” he said; “there are 15,000 now. I believe the Iran nuclear deal has prevented war there for a generation. We can continue to work to make things better.”

caregiving/Death and Dying/End-of-Life/Family and Friends/friendships/General interest/geriatrics/Lifestyle/Optimism Collection/seniors/USA/Women

September 21, 2016October 20, 2021

Loss, Love and Loyalty

by Fran Johns

Several decades ago a close friend of mine lost her only son in a senseless, tragic accident. He was in his late teens, on his motorcycle, on his way to work at a part-time Christmas season job. All of which added to the unspeakable sadness: a promising life cut short amidst the merriment of a season of joy.

Her friends gathered around to do what we could. We brought food, made lists of callers, tried to keep track of daily needs. My friend’s daughter, a best friend of my own daughter, suddenly found herself the middle child of three girls, all bereft of the one brother they had so loved.

In the large, shifting, changing, sorrowing group of those who came to the house were a number of young men also in their late teens who had been friends of the one now gone from their midst. They said to the bereaved parents, “We’ll always be here for you. We’ll always remember Mark, and represent him in your lives.” The kind of thing people often say at such times.

These were teenagers. Ordinary kids starting out in life – who had been in their own share of ordinary teenage mischief. In the ensuing years they had their own share of ups and downs. But as it turned out, they were true to their word. They were there for Mark’s parents at Christmas and New Year’s, graduations he would have shared, special times he would have been a part of.

Time passed, Mark’s friends matured as his parents (and this writer) aged.

Recently, Mark’s father died. I happened to be back in town at the time – though like many of those young people I had gone on to life elsewhere – and was happy to be able to be with my old friend and her daughters at his memorial service. It was a bittersweet time: he had lived a full and honorable life; old friends had come to celebrate that life and talk of the good times we had shared. My daughter, still best friends with Mark’s sister although they live on opposite coasts, was there with me.

As I looked around the gathering after the service I slowly began to recognize middle-aged men I had known all those years ago. Several had married women I recognized — also from all those years ago. They were now telling stories of their own children who are starting college or launching their own new lives. They were Mark’s representatives. The stand-ins for their long-ago friend whose memory they would not let die, whose presence they would certify to the mother who lost him so long ago.

How to make sense of it all, young life cut short, long life come full circle? How, indeed, to make sense of life and death and loss and continuity?

Mark’s friends, I think, help answer those questions. Out of loss and tragedy come love and loyalty. Out of singular death comes communal life. Out of anguished sadness comes humanity. We all come and go, but we’re all in it together. For a few years or a few decades – but together.

caregiving/Death and Dying/End-of-Life/General interest/Health/Healthcare/Medicine/San Francisco/seniors

September 14, 2016October 7, 2021

Caregiving and the fight-flight-freeze response

by Fran Johns

Fight, flight or freeze. Those are the three traditional options we humans have when confronted with dangerous or overwhelming situations. Judy Long suggests a fourth: challenge. For caregivers whose stress levels often keep them on a high-fight-or-flight alert, this new option can come as good news.

Long spoke recently on Caregiver Resilience and Well-Being: Sustainable Caregiving at a meeting in San Francisco. “The ‘challenge’ response,” she told members of the San Francisco Bay Area Network for End of Life Care, “can actually have biological benefits. When you can look at (your stress) as excitement you can actually perform better.”

Judy Long, who is currently Palliative Care Chaplain in the Department of Neuropathy at the University of California San Francisco, has an extensive list of credentials in things like Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindful Self-Compassion – the academics underlying today’s insights into the caregiving business. And for those in the trenches of caregiving, small suggestions can offer big help.

“Sustainable caregiving,” Long says, involves “all of the things we do for ourselves when we’re involved with caregiving. I know how exhausting it can be. But we can all be doing things that have great meaning, that are nurturing and nourishing for ourselves.”

Long tells of completing her chaplaincy training, which included a year of training at the University of California San Francisco. One year later, she says, she was asked to take on a six-month chaplaincy at UCSF – assigned to the neonatal intensive care unit, commonly referred to as NICU. “I wondered how to keep myself centered in all that terrible suffering.” The patients in NICU are mostly premature or very sick hands-with-hearts infants, lying in “isolettes.” While extraordinary progress has been made, and continues to be made, with successful treatments, having a newborn in NICU is stressful for parents, and many infants die. It falls to the chaplain, much of the time, to tell a parent his or her baby will not survive, or will have permanent damage. “I found out I was okay with that,” Long says, partly for having had some time in between training and actual chaplaincy work in a difficult setting.

“I’m a pragmatist,” Long says; “I always ask what works.” She was determined not to fall into the trap of many caregivers: “overwhelm, shutting myself off from caring by building an armor. Caregiving also points back to ourselves.”

Long credits one of her teachers and mentors, Roshi Joan Halifax of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, NM, with offering guidelines she uses to guard against the common pitfalls of isolation – “there are a lot of opportunities to be isolated while trying to do good” – and the sense of helplessness. “I call them my three points: purpose, connection and control.”

Long’s audience at the recent meeting included many who have chosen, as Long herself has, a career path in the caregiving field. It also included three older women, among whom is this writer, who are fulltime caregivers for their husbands: one with peripheral neuropathy, one with both cancer and progressive memory loss and one with Parkinson’s disease. For the family caregiver, purpose and connection are clear. But control? An elusive element at best.

Which brings us back to the fight-flight-freeze business. Challenge may still be an option.

Abortion/Campaigns/General interest/Locations/Politics & Causes/Reproductive rights/USA/Women

August 3, 2016August 4, 2016

Power to the (Grassroots) People

by Fran Johns

Scary times, these. Advocates for reproductive justice, already battling restrictive laws in state after state, now have reason to fear an erratic potential president whose Supreme Court choices could disastrously affect generations of women.

COTF.1

People with hope, though, just keep working, one person/one voice at a time. Among grassroots efforts to preserve national sanity in general, and protect women in particular, a movement underway this summer is worth noting.

CallThemOutFL grew out of the creative minds of two young Florida expats, Arianne Keegan and Abigail DeAtley, high school friends from Delray Beach now living in New York. Thanks to statewide redistricting, every seat in the Florida state legislature, both Senate and House of Representatives, is up for election in 2016. This seemed, to Keegan and DeAtley, too good a chance to pass up. Their hope is to shift the balance of what has been an anti-choice legislative body they do not believe has the best interest (or support) of Florida women. COTF.3

“When we found out that Florida HB 1411 had passed, and was slated to go into effect on July 1,” Keegan says, “we wanted to educate folks, and also to spread the word.” HB 1411 adds further monetary restrictions to anti-abortion laws in the state which are among the most stringent in the nation. “We decided to launch a campaign urging individuals to contact their representatives and call them out on how they voted. We see this as an opportunity to let people know about the TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws and how damaging they are, especially to underserved women.” (HB 1411 was challenged in court, and remains blocked as that process continues.)

The two held their first CTOF event last July 2 in Brooklyn. Some 20 supporters gathered at Molasses Books in Bushwick to discuss the issue, and the oppressive laws. They then wrote more than 100 messages to elected officials on postcards designed for the cause by graphic artist friends of the co-founders. Keegan and DeAtley have also enlisted fellow Florida ex-pats around the country – in Washington DC, New Orleans, Miami and elsewhere – and in a few overseas locations – to host similar events throughout the summer. Toolkits available for such happenings include postcards, factsheets, learning activities and a sample presentation designed to explain the issue and engage audience members in fighting against reproductive oppression. The kits also include specific information on Florida’s HB 1411. ctof5

On the CTOFwebsite is a wealth of information about the issue, in Florida and elsewhere. Will the innovative effort have any definitive impact? The votes aren’t in yet. But in this election year anything can happen.

crime/General interest/Lifestyle/Optimism Collection/Politics & Causes/Religion/San Francisco/USA/World Affairs

July 11, 2016October 20, 2021

Sewing Seeds of Peace & Justice

by Fran Johns

I have always drawn the line at public demonstrations. Writing letters to editors or legislators, signing petitions, calling representatives, even publishing blogs & the occasional tweet – those reasonable, genteel efforts in behalf of justice – have satisfied my self-righteousness self-image just fine. Marching, picketing, that sort of in-your-face activity I have happily left to other more courageous friends.

But now? Mass shootings, killings of seemingly innocent African Americans by police, sniper killings of police “in retaliation”? A dangerously polarized country facing a presidential choice between the two most unpopular candidates in history – one a widely mistrusted history-making woman and the other a scary narcissist egomaniac (IMHO)? No peace, little justice.

What can you do?

When a couple of guys who have become unlikely close friends decide to put together a rally on the steps of City Hall, you show up. One leads a mostly white, fairly traditional Presbyterian church in an upscale neighborhood, the other leads an African American Pentecostal congregation in a depressed area across town. Within a few days, at the end of a week that saw the shooting of an African American man in Minnesota and the killing of five policemen in Dallas, the two friends arranged an event to argue for sanity:

FAITH COMMUNITIES UNITED FOR JUSTICE AND PEACE. Nothing big, nothing political, nothing advertised as changing the world. A chance, though, for people from across the spectrums of race, politics and religion to show up and share their hope for a better world. For this writer, and strangers of assorted skin colors and garb (yarmulkes, hoodies, religious robes, flip flops) it was a chance to stand shoulder to shoulder, sign to sign, and catch one’s breath after recent weeks of tragedy and horror.

One of the ministers in attendance, who happens also to be a professionally trained singer, warmed up the crowd (which grew incrementally as the hour progressed) with a group sing-along to an old spiritual: I feel like going on. Though trials mount on every hand, I feel like going on.

An Asian American legislator told the crowd he had brought along his 4-month-old son. He and his wife have just bought a home in the depressed area. “so that my son can grow up,” he said, “with Black and Latino friends. I hope they will all be judged by their character.”

An interfaith leader quoted Martin Luther King, Jr’s phrase, “Returning violence for violence multiples violence.” He argued for turning this trend around – and drew applause when he said, “We need to support gun laws.”

A tall, young African American man holding an orange sign that read “LOVE & PEACE” spoke of his own father being shot by a policeman when the son was 16.

A public official told of an incident several days earlier in which an armed man had been talked down from a threatening situation, “and no one was injured or killed.”

A rabbi quoted a Jewish prayer from Deuteronomy, “Justice, justice shall you pursue . . .”

One of the leaders of a Muslim organization that promotes interfaith cooperation and understanding spoke of the message of peace which is central to Islam.

Signs were waved – they carried words and phrases like: Walk Humbly. All Lives Matter. Light Overcomes Darkness. – and – Imagine all the people living life in peace.

When the crowd disbursed, stepping out of the shadow of the City Hall steps and back into the summer sunshine, there was a demonstrable sense of light overcoming darkness. The word is that rallies and demonstrations for peace were taking place across the country on the same day. Out of them all, perhaps, will emerge a few seeds of justice and compassion to push back against the anger and hostility that has claimed every news cycle of recent months.

Because, as another widely quoted saying also heard from the rally lectern goes, You have to give them something to hope for.

Previous 1 … 6 7 8 9 10 … 45 Next