A White Vampire Story
From Gobshite Quarterly Winter 2004
In 1996, while I was working with a medical team treating refugees of the civil war in Rwanda, I made a habit of driving a 4-year-old Hutu child to tears every day for nearly a week straight. The truth is, I love children, and under ordinary circumstances, I think I’m a pretty decent person. But hers was a special case. I made it my mission to terrify this frail little girl at every available opportunity—so much so that when I woke up in the morning, before first light I had thought of a dozen ways to torment her.
Of course this wasn’t the main reason I was in Africa. I was working as a… Read More »
Who’s Afraid of Cap & Trade
From The Bear Deluxe magazine: June 2009
When you cheat on your partner you add to the heartbreak, pain and jealousy in the atmosphere. Cheatneutral offsets your cheating by funding someone else to be faithful and not cheat. This neutralises [sic] the pain and unhappy emotion and leaves you with a clear conscience.
—Spoof of Cap & Trade schemes at Cheatneutral.com. “Helping you because you can’t help yourself.”
In 2007, psychologist Paul Slovic and his colleagues conducted an obscure experiment in which starving children in Mali were used to quantify the breaking point of human compassion. His findings, and those of others who… Read More »
Out, out, damn dams
Tags | Environment
From The Bear Deluxe magazine: June 2009
Molli Jane White, a Karuk Indian from the banks of the beleaguered Klamath River, says her husband, Leaf Hillman, drove four hours (one way) last September in order to ask the Yuruk Tribe in Happy Camp, Calif. for two salmon so that the Karuk would have a few forkfuls of fish to offer tribal members during their annual salmon renewal ceremony. White, 26, appreciates the irony, she says, but she’d rather see PacifiCorp, which operates four hydroelectric dams along a 300-mile stretch of the Klamath in Southern Oregon and Northern California, eat concrete. So to speak. At the present moment, she… Read More »
Al Quds Militiawoman
Tags
An Al-Quds militiawoman pauses during an anti-American demonstration Feb. 8, 2003 in Tikrit, Iraq. The military parade featured roughly 45,000 civilians in an exhibition of Iraqi resistance to U.S. forces.
The annual Al-Quds (which means “Jerusalem” in Arabic) parade was held every year to honor Sadaam Hussein’s birthday. Hussein was born in a small town just outside Tikrit. Hussein claimed that the Al-Quds Militia would be used to drive Israelis from Palestine.
Hardscrabble Salvation
From Utne magazine (originally published in In Good Tilth) Nov./Dec. 2010
In 1974 my mother, my father, and I moved from a trailer park in Cleveland to a 97-acre farm in Liberty, West Virginia. I was 13, a city brat, an only child, and I thought I’d died and gone to hell. The world I left was coated in concrete, which led to shopping centers and movie theaters. The world to which I was banished was covered in corn, beans, potatoes, and squash, which led to blisters.
A wise child would have been grateful. He would have seen that so much land, so much freedom, is worth a little blood. He would have thanked his mother for this second… Read More »
Sura
Tags | Iraq & Militarism
From Night of a Thousand Stars and Other Portraits of Iraq (Nazraeli Press: 2006)
She is one of a group of about 150 armed militiawomen who’ve surrounded me on a parade ground in Tikrit, Iraq⎯circling, jabbing the air with their Kalishnikov’s, chanting, “Down with Bush! Down with U.S.A.!”
We’re all enduring the annual Al Quds Militia parade, held here every February 8 to celebrate the birthday of Sadaam Hussein, whose rags-to-rags story began in a hamlet on the outskirts of this desolate desert town.
I doubt that many of the women understand the script that’s been handed to them. It’s a drama that’s obviously… Read More »
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