A New Year’s wish: Human Rights for all

December 19, 2017 By Fran Johns in General interest, Law, Lifestyle, Politics & Causes, Public Figures, Religion, USA, World Affairs Tags: Allyson McKinney Timm, calvary presbyterian church, CEDAW, Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, Eleanor Roosevelt, human rights, International Justice Mission, Justice Revival, United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights Leave a comment

UN emblem Belated Human Rights Day greetings to all. In case you missed it, Human Rights Day was celebrated around the globe on December 10. It was the 69^th anniversary of the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris, 1948.

Admittedly, some of us have done a little better than others with this. But before we Americans get to feeling righteous, it’s worth noting that the U.S. is among a handful of countries (Russia, Palau . . .) which have not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW.) We’re okay with the Convention Against Torture, but not with the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It’s complicated.

Are women’s rights human rights? What about immigrant rights? Or the rights of workers (tech geniuses, janitors, whomever) to good working conditions? Or the rights of Yemeni refugees to food and shelter?

The author with Ally Timm

One person who believes human rights apply to all of us is Allyson McKinney Timm. Timm spoke recently at Calvary Presbyterian Church, trying to explain the UDHR (and a lot of complicated UN acronyms) and why human rights are basic to Christianity – as well as other religions. “Human rights,” she explains, “are inherent, apply to every individual based solely on the fact of being human. The only requirement is being a member of the human race.”

In the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (a document worth reading) “Member States…pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,”

We wish.

Ally McKinney Timm was a successful attorney with a high-powered San Francisco law firm, advocating for justice in the juvenile prison system, when she left that comfortable life to move to Uganda and establish a field office of the International Justice Mission, defending widows and children there. She previously worked with the Rwandan genocide trials. Eventually she returned to Yale, first teaching human rights in the law school and then earning a Master of Divinity degree. All of those credentials and experiences led Timm to found Justice Revival, which she now serves as Director. Having witnessed the worst of what happens when human rights are denied, she has a determined passion for Justice Revival and its mission: to inspire, educate, and mobilize Christian communities to defend human rights for all. (Some conservative Christian organizations have been at the forefront of successful efforts to keep the U.S. from ratifying CEDAW, which is designed to eliminate discrimination against women.)

Eleanor Roosevelt UN monument Another woman with a passion for human rights was Eleanor Roosevelt. Wife of Depression-era President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the country’s longest-serving first lady was among many other things, the first U.S. representative to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Her pivotal work on creating – and securing near-unanimous support for – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights won Mrs. Roosevelt an accolade never seen before, or since: a standing ovation for one of its members by the entire United Nations Assembly.

About that Declaration, and what it proclaims? Just a few of the basic rights to which every human on the planet is entitled include:

Life, liberty, security and equality

Freedom from discrimination

Freedom from torture and cruel or degrading punishment

Privacy: freedom from interference with home, family

Freedom of religion, conscience, belief

We wish.

You can read the entire document here. If there were ever a better roadmap to peace on earth, it would be hard to find.

Happy New Year, wherever on earth you may be. And God bless us every one.

Protests, and Hope for the Future

November 29, 2017 By Fran Johns in Abortion, General interest, Medicine, Politics & Causes, Public Figures, Reproductive rights, San Francisco, USA, Women Tags: abortion rights, Dr. Willie Parker, Indivisibles, Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice, Physicians for Reproductive Health, Protests, Reproductive justice, Stand Up San Francisco, Women's march Leave a comment

We considered it a badge of honor. An event I engineered recently (with a LOT of help from my friends) in San Francisco drew luminaries from the interfaith community, women’s rights and reproductive justice groups – and several stalwart protesters holding signs aloft in the chilly drizzle. What’s a champagne reception without protesters? Dr. Willie Parker flyer jpeg

Actually, they were not protesting the champagne reception (though they were there before it started.) They were protesting the main event that followed: Reproductive Justice on the Front Lines. It was a conversation between Director of the UCSF Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health Carole Joffe and noted physician/author Dr. Willie Parker. Dr. Parker, a deeply committed Christian and an abortion provider, believes it is morally right for a pregnant woman to control what happens to her body. The protesters believe the fetus takes priority over the woman carrying it. To set the record straight, our protesters were hardly worth notice as far as Dr. Parker is concerned – he is used to being the target of threats and angry insults hurled by protesters who regularly surround the deep south clinics where he flies to provide service to mostly young, poor women of color seeking abortion care.

I appreciated our protesters’ civility, but rather strongly disagree with their dismissal of women like me. These sign-carriers would have opposed my back-alley 1956 abortion, demanding that I carry that rape-caused, life-wrecking pregnancy to term. march-crowd

Which brings up this current reality: there are protesters who want to destroy rights, and protesters fighting to keep them. There are sign-carriers wanting to send us back to the dark ages, and fighters for light overcoming darkness. Fighters for human rights, for the poor and marginalized, for the planet, for decency, sanity, truth.

I’m with the protesters who are fighters-for. Their movement aims to get us back to being a country of justice for all, and get the U.S., eventually, back to its long-held place of respect around the world. It’s a movement forward that I joined with the pure-joy Women’s March early this year. Happily those protesters are still out there in force: the Stand-Ups, the Indivisibles, the Occupiers, the MoversOn, the countless other groups all over the country. Young and old, male, female, gay, straight, black, brown, white, they embody that same Women’s March spirit of ebullient hope.

And they are my hope for the future.

On Taking a Hiatus

November 11, 2017 By Fran Johns in General interest, Lifestyle, Reproductive rights, San Francisco, USA Tags: Life's Work: A Moral Argument for Choice, Willie Parker 6 Comments

“Are you okay,” asked a perfect stranger who tracks this space? “You haven’t posted anything in some time; I hope you’re just on hiatus.” One of the things that makes blogging such fun is hearing from perfect strangers – not to mention good friends who also drop in. Dr. Willie Parker flyer jpeg

Well, no, I’ve not exactly been on hiatus. Life has just been overloaded with national bad news, concern for friends suffering from local bad news like the Wine Country wildfires, and the very good news of an impending event featuring the remarkable Dr. Willie Parker that I’ve been working 24-hours-a-day on for many months. (If you’re anywhere near the San Francisco Bay Area, come! If you’re not, check out his new book Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice.)

But I got to thinking about that hiatus business. What a lovely word. It is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an interruption in time or continuity” – which certainly covers my non-blogging in recent weeks – but also (Cambridge Dictionary) as “a short pause in which nothing happens, or a space where something no longer is” – which also works.

Patty van Delft –Petite Magique

Just a little etymological digging, though, uncovers a few more definitions/applications including this one from the Free Dictionary by Farlex: “A gap or interruption in space, time, or continuity; a break.” If there is anyone following the news of the world, especially the news of the little corner of the world occupied by the USA, who doesn’t need a break, I don’t know who he or she would be.

Hanging Out With Ai Weiwei

October 16, 2017 By Fran Johns in Arts, Environment, General interest, Politics & Causes, Public Figures, San Francisco, World Affairs Tags: Ai Weiwei, China, climate one, Commonwealth Club of California, greg dalton, Human Flow, refugees 2 Comments

Ai Weiwei, in town to promote his new film “Human Flow” is less like a global icon than a kid on the first day of vacation. He gleefully mugs for photos, takes selfies with – and of – his audiences, bears a perpetual crinkly smile and when asked “When are you happiest?” replies, “Now.”

Ai Weiwei smiles for a fan

But the message of the internationally renowned artist is deadly serious. He wants the world to confront the fact that over 65 million human beings are displaced, most of them living in deplorable conditions in refugee camps and only a tiny fraction (about 3%) being relocated. “Human Flow” depicts refugees in 23 countries – in camps, on the move, struggling across deserts, through murky waters and occasional war zones. It documents a staggering amount of human suffering which its creator wants us to face as fellow human beings. “The world is shrinking,” he says; “people from different religions, different cultures are going to have to learn to live with each other.”

Ai appeared before a sold-old crowd at the Commonwealth Club recently, in conversation with Climate One founder and host Greg Dalton, who started off by asking what his guest felt Europe should do. “It’s not just a European problem,” Ai Weiwei responded, “it’s global – Iraq, Myanmar, elsewhere. Policies in the U.S. seeking to reduce immigrants, enforce a travel ban, move away people who have been here since childhood – there is a strong trend to violate human rights and traditional beliefs. We are all refugees.”

With Climate One’s Greg Dalton

Ai Weiwei was born in 1957, the year his father, the Chinese poet Ai Qing was arrested and denounced during the Anti-Rightist Movement. He was one year old when the family was sent to a labor camp in Beidahuang, Heilongjiang. According to his Wikipedia page, they were later exiled to Shihezi, Xinjiang in 1961, where they lived for 16 years. In 1976, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, Ai and his family returned to Beijing. At one point, during his lively conversation with Dalton at the Commonwealth Club, Ai said he used to be jealous of his father. “He got all those years, and all I got (referring to his imprisonment for “economic crimes” in 2011) was 81 days.” His 81 days were, however, no picnic. “If you argue with the government,” he said, “you never win. They become so powerful you can get suicidal.” Ai Weiwei 1-10.17

On the issues closer to the focus of Climate One, Ai spoke of how China “has made huge progress, and has become quite economically powerful. But the dark side are environmental problems: heavily polluted air and rivers. Besides that there is huge corruption. There are internal struggles inside the party; no trust, no real creativity because there’s no freedom of speech.” To Dalton’s remark that Ai had once tried to work within the system, Ai laughed. “I was very naïve.” Despite his history of battling the government Ai was given his passport in 2015 and now lives in Berlin.

“When they handed me my passport, the guy said, “We’ve known each other for so long . . .”

Sixty-five Million Migrant Stories

October 12, 2017 By Fran Johns in General interest, Politics & Causes, Religion, San Francisco, USA Tags: Asian Prisoner Support Group, calvary presbyterian church, Immigration, Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, Rev. Deborah Lee, Sanctuary Churches, Vietnam War 2 Comments

Talk of “Immigrants” and “Migrants” is part of life today: some 65 million human beings are on the move, forced from their homes by war, flood, hunger, persecution, living in overcrowded camps, or simply walking. The talk can obscure the fact that these are 65 million individual stories. This is one of them.

The author with Ke

My new friend Ke came to Calvary Presbyterian Church recently, speaking first to the entire congregation and later to a group grappling with the issue of becoming a Sanctuary Church. More on that later. Ke accompanied the Rev. Deborah Lee, Senior Program Director of Immigration, with the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, whose credentials include several decades of work for social justice despite appearing (to this octogenarian at least) to be 15 or 16 years old at most. Rev. Lee and her organization work to help vulnerable people, and to help people like this writer and others understand how they might help.

It is Ke’s story that I want to tell.

Ke came to the U.S. forty years ago as a very young child, escaping the horrors of the raging Vietnam war. If you’re old enough to remember those days you will remember Vietnam as one of the seriously ill-advised wars of our country’s history. But Ke – whose full name is Nghiep Ke Lam – was lucky to survive the perilous journey to freedom and was granted refugee status. According to this writer’s unscientific research, some 800,000 Vietnamese refugees were resettled in the U.S. in those years, not all into ideal circumstances.

Ke’s family found a place to live in an unsavory San Francisco neighborhood. When he was 7 years old he was confronted by a group of bullies who gave him the option of running for his life or fighting one of them. He decided to fight. After he pummeled the older bully to the ground the others congratulated him – an early lesson in problem-solving by violence. When he was 8 he took a year off from school to care for his new baby brother; his father had left the family and his mother was struggling to make ends meet. Once he returned to school Ke did well enough to be accepted into the city’s most prestigious public high school – but because it was too far from his neighborhood he couldn’t take advantage of the opportunity.

Vietnam War 1972 Photo by Raymond Depardon

At 17 Ke committed a crime that would send him to prison for the next two decades. While there he stayed fit, avoided trouble and took advantage of every chance to pick up new skills and credentials. “I can fix the plumbing in your house,” he told the church congregation. “I can also offer counseling.” But he found a stronger calling: he now serves as fulltime Reentry Coordinator for the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, helping others who face the challenges he faced on being released from prison with no money and no job. A number of sources help Ke find used bicycles which he restores to working condition; he then gives them to those released from incarceration (usually having to teach the new bike owners how to ride) so they are able to seek and find work.

Will Calvary become a Sanctuary Church? We don’t have facilities to offer physical sanctuary, but could offer other levels of help such as advocacy or accompaniment (it can be scary to go to deportation hearings,) those sorts of perfectly legal things. There is no unanimity of opinion on this. Presbyterians tend to be strongly opinionated, and seldom opinionated in unison. Most of us do, though, spend time considering what Jesus might have to say about it all.

Photo by Thomas Hawk

Meanwhile, Ke is at risk of deportation. The country to which he would be sent is not currently accepting deportees, something the Trump administration is pressuring countries to change. Also at risk of deportation are the 11+ million individuals now living in the U.S. Some of those human beings are bad people most Americans would want deported. Some of them are working hard at jobs, like Ke’s, that help others and strengthen our nation. Some of them are running businesses they’ve run for decades. Some of them have been in the U.S. since they were toddlers, never knowing any other homeland. Every one is an individual story.

And there are 65 million stories.

Emergency Medicine Then & Now

October 2, 2017 By Fran Johns in caregiving, end of life, Family and Friends, General interest, physicians, sisters Tags: Childhood injuries, dental surgery, Dentists, emergency medicine, Richard Leeds 3 Comments

The author and sister Mimi, circa 1940

We were, I think, about six and eight. My sister Mimi and I came home from somewhere, hot and tired and thirsty. We leaned our bikes against the side porch and ran up to the French door – which was stuck tight, as often happened on muggy days. I gave the door a mighty wham. But I missed the wood frame I was aiming for and my hand crashed through the glass pane. I stood there saying “Oh my! Oh my!” until Mimi, who was wise beyond her years, reached through the hole, turned the knob and shoved the door open. I think I was still “Oh my!-ing” while Mimi lead me through the living room, hallway and dining room to the kitchen, splattering blood along the way. We grabbed dish towels, tied them around my arm, returned to our bikes and headed for the offices of our friend Dr. Enos Ray.

Like most small-town doctors’ offices in the 1940s, Dr. Ray’s office consisted of several rooms adjacent to his home – about 8 or 10 blocks from our house. He stitched up my wound, after listening to the story and rather cleverly asking if we had left a note of explanation for our mother. Oops, hadn’t thought of that. Mrs. Ray obligingly started calling around to see if she could find our mother before she encountered an unexplained bloody scene on coming home from somewhere Mimi and I didn’t remember. Dr. Ray probably sent our parents a bill for $5.

The scar survives

My memory of the entire incident ends with the bike ride home, all beautifully bandaged and hoping we would see a lot of friends on the way. But the scar (now getting pretty dim amidst the blotches and mottles of seven+ decades) is a constant reminder of my days with the World’s Best Big Sister and a current reminder of the changes in healthcare over those decades.

I was re-reminded recently. I am fond of remarking at the slightest opportunity that I still, in my golden octogenarian years, have all my original parts – give or take a few teeth. Two of those unoriginal teeth are in the form of very expensive crowns attached for the last 15 years to a far more expensive (not to mention painfully acquired) implant. Not long ago, they decided to swing slightly outward, without so much as a by-your-leave. After a moment of horror (and gratitude that this happened at breakfast with no one but a sympathetic husband at the table) I realized I could nudge them back to where they belonged. I took to chewing on the other side. I called my good friend, longtime neighbor and fine dentist Richard Leeds. He said I should make an appointment with his implant friend Dr. Chin. “You’ll really like Dr. Chin,” he said. “It’s kind of like going to see the mad scientist. But he’s the best.” So I waited until Dr.Chin returned from vacation. And indeed, despite the very proper and competent staff who welcomed me, there was something of a mad scientist to the good doctor. “Let me just peeeeeer around here,” he would say, reaching for strange radar-beam lights and x-ray machines, studying my jaw from every conceivable angle.

Eventually, he said, “There’s good news and bad news. The bad news is that you’ll Grin probably need an expensive new crown. The good news is that the implant is just fine so you don’t need surgery, so you don’t need me.” Whereupon he shook my hand, said it had been a pleasure, and no, there was no charge.

Later, summoned back to Dr. Leeds’ office – and anticipating future appointments for expensive new crowns – I thanked him for sending me to the charming mad scientist. He said he had a few not-so-mad-scientist ideas of his own. Whereupon he gave me a crash course in types of crowns and types of implants now in use, and explained that he thought he could screw my errant teeth back to where they belonged. The explanation was accompanied by several rather vehement maneuvers, and followed by extensive fiddlings around, bite-checking, tooth-filing and what have you. And lo, I am back to where I started with the non-original teeth and their original compatriots. Dr. Leeds will send a bill for considerably more than $5, but probably thousands less than a new crown would have cost. I could not help remembering the days of the de riguer family doctor and family dentist.

Sadly, it should be noted here that Dr. Ray has long since gone to his rewards, and Dr. Leeds is no longer accepting new patients. But given the precarious state of healthcare in the U.S., I can only be grateful for the extraordinary emergency care (Kaiser Permanente included) this middle-class American has been blessed to receive.

Would that healthcare were such for everyone.

Take a Minute to Breathe

September 16, 2017 By Fran Johns in General interest, Politics & Causes, Technology, USA Tags: deep breathing, Fitness, Technology, tweets, world news 3 Comments

Breathe “Take a minute to breathe,” my watch said. How did it know? This message arrived, unbidden, in the late afternoon of a day full of unpleasant chores, contentious meetings, unexpected crises and the usual daily events. It made me laugh. And breathe. Or at the very least, sigh.

I don’t know about this breathing business. If we aren’t doing it we’re definitely dead, or about to be, but the conscious breathing business – there may be something to it. So it is certainly worth a reminder or two.

(Anyone who knows me knows I would never spend actual money for a gadget that tells me to breathe; I helped with a study at the request of a friend, and we got to keep the watch. But I have to admit to a growing affection. This gadget knows stuff. After I finished working out in the park on the first day of San Francisco’s recent, obscene heat wave, it told me how far I’d walked, how much energy I’d expended, how high my heart rate had gone – and then it said, “It’s 96 degrees, dummy, what are you doing exercising in 96-degree heat? At your age??” Or something like that; I don’t remember its exact words. Of course, it doesn’t know everything. Such as, if I want to take a nap, shouldn’t it know I don’t want to be nudged to Stand after 15 minutes? I take it off for naps.)

But back to breathing.

Calm, measured, thoughtful breathing may be the only answer to finding peace in these days. North Korea firing nuclear missiles? Breathe. Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, record-breaking heat waves and climate change deniers? Breathe. Air and water pollution, thanks to relaxed environmental regulations, threatening the very lives of your grandchildren? Breathe. And that latest tweet, post or whatever startling message from cyberspace? Breathe, breathe.

Perhaps someone who understands social media better than I could institute a new policy: No tweet, post or instant-photo can be fired off until the person behind it has taken three slow, deep breaths. Think about it. Breathe.2 Such an action would require engaging the brain, and how much personal and national angst might be avoided if brains were required to be engaged in advance? A small reduction in lies, vulgarities and scary messages . . .?

Sigh.