February 1997 Issue, v88
children, churches and daddies
the unreligious, nonfamily-oriented literary and art magazine
news you can use
Stalking Expert Calls For Laws and Treatment
LONDON (Reuter) - A pig’s heads with a threat nailed to it, beheaded cats, voodoo dolls impaled with pins, chocolates and pornography - these are some of the unorthodox and unwanted gifts received by victims of stalkers.
Now, an Australian scientist says the obsessive men and women who impetuously trail luminaries such as Princess Diana, Dan Rather, and Madonna can be cured.
They need help and many can be cured of their obsessional behavior if they are compelled by law to have treatment, behavioral scientist Dr Paul Mullen of Monash University in Melbourne said.
Mullen told an international conference that 70 percent of all stalking victims suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and nearly a quarter thought of committing suicide.
“The vast majority of victims’ lives have been wrecked without ever having been touched,’’ he said.
The United States and Australia lead the world in anti-stalker legislation but Mullen stressed that imprisonment alone was an ineffective means of treating the disorder.
“Most stalkers don’t go for treatment voluntarily and have to be compelled to come forward,’’ he told a press conference.
Mullen, who has worked with more than 100 victims in one of the most comprehensive studies on stalking in the world, found that most, but not all, stalkers were male, half of victims had been threatened and 30 percent were eventually assaulted.
Fifteen people in his group were male victims and 12-13 women had been stalked by other women. A third of victims had no prior knowledge acquaintance with their stalker and another third had been sexually intimate with them.
“The motive is not always sexual. One of the most persistent women stalkers was looking for the ideal friend,’’ he said.
Mullen lists stalkers according to type - rejected ex-partners or former intimates, workers seeking revenge for losing jobs or promotions, and the erotomaniacs with a morbid preoccupation with another individual.
Serial killers fall into the last group. “For some socially and intellectually disabled people, stalking may be an attempt at making a relationship,’’ Mullen said.
“But there is also a very dangerous predatory group which fortunately is rare. These are people who take a sadistic pleasure in the fear they produce. They may well go on to make a sexual or violent attack.’’
Princess Diana, Madonna, CBS anchorman Dan Rather and Queen Elizabeth’s daughter Princess Anne are among the most famous stalking victims. Celebrities, health professionals, lawyers and adult education teachers are all in a high-risk group.
When asked how you might spot a potential stalker in a spouse or lover, Mullen warned people to be wary of those who show a high degree of jealousy and dependence and who suffer from substance abuse.
Swarms of Locust Invade Yemen
SANAA, Oct 19 (Reuter) - Three swarms of desert locusts have invaded Yemen over the past few days and authorities were in contact with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) on how to combat the infestation, a newspaper said.
The official newspaper al-Thawra quoted Mohammad al-Ghashm, an agriculture ministry official, as saying the swarms came from Eritrea and Sudan and had spread over different parts of Yemen.
The migratory insects fly in swarms each containing some 12 million or more and devour green plantations, experts said.
Ghashm said more swarms were expected in the coming few days from the Horn of Africa, where locusts were active in Somalia and Ethiopia, as well as in Saudi Arabia.
He said Yemen had contacted the FAO and neighbouring countries on how to combat the locusts on the ground and in the air.
Locusts invaded Yemen in 1992 and 1993, devastating large cultivated areas. Sorghum is one of the main crops in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the region.
“X” Marks the Spot In Hungary
By John Nadler
BUDAPEST (Variety) - Hungary, a popular location for U.S. and West European filmmakers, is diversifying into a new cinematic sector: erotica.
Since communism’s fall five years ago, Hungary has become a European haven for pornographic moviemaking, and “the center of the porno world,’’ according to Italian film producer Gianfranco Romagnoli.
Far from stifling mainstream filmmaking, “legitimate’’ porn is injecting badly needed cash into the service industry, and creating opportunities for U.S. and West European producers.
U.S. porn filmmaker Patrick Collins makes movies in Hungary for American distribution, profiting from the huge blue-movie infrastructure and low production costs here.
Budapest is now the permanent home of France’s Christophe Clark, one of the continent’s top erotic actors, who makes soft and hard-core pornographic movies for a local production company.
The capital also is the base of operations for Italian producer Romagnoli, co-owner of the Blue Angel casting agency and the service company Touch Me Prods.
According to France’s HOT magazine, the infrastructure in Budapest these auteurs have created constitutes the “greatest (talent) pool of resources of its kind in Europe concentrated in a given place.’’
In fact, Hungary’s legitimate porn industry is fueling the entire European market. Eight to 10 pornographic movies are shot in Hungary every month - 10% of the continent’s monthly output of 100 films, reports Hungary’s Private Profit magazine.
About 90% of Europe’s erotic actresses hail from Hungary, said Clark. As a measure of proof, the industry’s biggest stars - Cicciolina (born Ilona Staller), Anita Rinaldi (Anita Skultety), Erica Bella, Angelica Bella and Simona Valli - to name only a few - are Hungarians with Italian stage names.
Porn’s impact on Hungary’s mainstream industry is undeniable. Erotica is shot on Mafilm sound stages, pumping cash into the coffers of Hungary’s premier studio complex, and employs Magyar movie crews and technicians.
Unlike most European countries, “in Hungary there is no law’’ banning pornographic moviemaking, explained Romagnoli. Hungarian law forbids child pornography. “But there are no regulations banning perversities like sodomy, bestiality, etc.,’’ said Istvan Kovacs, owner of Budapest’s Lux video.
This is good news for blue producers, but not the only reason for the industry’s proliferation here. The low cost of production in Eastern Europe makes it cheaper to film here than in the West, and Hungary’s actresses are in fierce demand.
“Budapest will stay at the (pornographic) center of Europe because of its girls,’’ said France’s Clark.
The exotic Magyar “look’’ is popular among consumers and producers of international porn. More importantly, producers argue that a liberal attitude toward sex in this culture makes casting easy.
“We can find in Budapest (at any one time) around 50 girls ready to star in a pornographic movie,’’ said Clark. “In France it is hard to find girls who are 18 or 19 years of age and are willing to star in such movies.’’
“The mentality (in Hungary) is very open,’’ explained Romagnoli. “In Italy, we have the Catholic Church and the mind is closed. In Eastern Europe, the mind is open.’’
There also is less education and awareness about AIDS. Thanks to Hungary’s open borders, actresses from all over the East and producers from the West converge on Budapest to meet and do business. Closed borders and underworld lawlessness in the former Soviet Union had prevented legitimate porn from gravitating east.
Surgeons Cut 100 lbs. Fat & Skin From Man
LOS ANGELES (Reuter) - A Los Angeles man who recently lost 400 pounds underwent surgery Friday to have another 100 pounds of excess skin and fat cut from his body.
Tommy McGruder was placed under anesthetic at Chapman Medical Center in the Los Angeles suburb of Orange for an operation that doctors expected to last late into the night.
The roughly 12 square feet of flesh and fat will be donated to a Pennsylvania research facility, where scientists will use the tissue to test experimental drugs for heart disease and motion sickness.
Midway through the surgery, hospital spokeswoman Trish Bartel said the procedure was going smoothly. She said doctors planned to start on McGruder’s legs, then move to the stomach. Anesthesiologists were expected to work in shifts.
Bartel said McGruder would be kept in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, wrapped in bandages.
McGruder, who has been bedridden by his obesity for nearly three years, dropped from 800 to 400 pounds over the last five months. But the giant folds of drooping skin that resulted have made it difficult for him to move and have presented a health hazard because they attract bacteria.
The 35-year-old former truck driver told the Orange County Register that he began to gain weight about nine years ago during a bout with depression.
“The refrigerator became my best friend,’’ he said. “My family and friends kept telling me to stop, but I’ve always been stubborn.’’
McGruder told the Register that a typical breakfast at the time included a dozen eggs, a dozen pancakes, about 12 sausages and two bowls of bacon.
He said he could not quit eating until the day eight months ago that he was rushed to the hospital with heart and respiratory problems.
“It scared the daylights out of me,’’ he said. “I told them I’d made up my mind that I was going to change my life.’’
Chapman Medical Center and plastic surgeon Ron Goldstein are donating about $63,000 in services for the operation.
Teen Who Lost Arm To Wolf Pack Gets Settlement
TORONTO, Oct 19 (Reuter) - A teenager whose arm was chewed off by wolves at a Toronto zoo a decade ago has received a settlement that could pay him up to $11.2 million if he lives to be 80, his lawyer said.
Scott Connor, now 17, will start receiving lifetime monthly payments in two years from an annuity contract purchased with the $934,000 out-of-court settlement paid by the Metro Toronto Zoo, said Connor’s lawyer Kathleen Timmis. When he was 6 years old, Connor lost his arm up to the shoulder after he, his 8-year-old brother and an 11-year-old friend climbed over a fence in the rear of the zoo and stumbled onto the Arctic wolf exhibit.
“Scott thought they were big dogs. The boys started trying to get their attention, hitting the fence with sticks and throwing cheesies at them,’’ Timmis said. “They attracted the attention of the wolves all too successfully,’’ she added. Connor fell and his arm went through the box-link wire fence. Timmis said several wolves then went after the boy. “Several of them grabbed onto his arm and basically devoured it,’’ she added.
What Makes Males Mean - Nitric Oxide Synthase
LONDON (Reuter) - Scientists reported they may have found an important key to male aggression - an enzyme in the brain known as nitric oxide synthase.
The researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that male mice lacking the enzyme were exceptionally aggressive, attacking other mice and their human handlers.
They said their findings could help explain aggression in humans as well.
Dr Ted Dawson, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins who worked on the study, said he and colleagues had been breeding mice deficient in the enzyme to study its effect on strokes and reproductive behavior.
“It’s a relatively newly discovered transmitter and it seems to have a wide range of very important roles,’’ Dawson said in a telephone interview. “What its exact normal roles are is not clear. This study suggests that one of its major functions is perhaps to inhibit aggressive behavior in mice.’’
Dawson said they first noticed the aggression when they put the specially bred males in with female mice.
“The males display excessive and inappropriate mounting behavior associated with substantial vocal protestations by the females,’’ the group wrote in the science journal Nature.
“The females were excessively screaming,’’ Dawson said.
The nitric oxide-deficient males also bit the scientists when handled, and would fight other males to the death.
“It’s actually quite dramatic. They start fighting and they don’t stop,’’ Dawson said.
The mutant males seemed normal in every other way, the researchers said. Female mice bred with the deficiency did not show unusual aggression, they added.
Dawson said it was likely that humans could show the same deficiency. “Because the gene for NOs (nitric oxide synthase) in the mouse is the same as it is in humans, there is probably the potential,’’ he said.
But he added that it was unlikely the chemical held the ultimate answer to aggression. “I think that violent behavior has multiple causes. There’s probably many social and socioeconomic factors.’’
Dawson said his team would see if they could find drugs that affect levels of the enzyme in the brain.
ARC Wins Another Victory for the Animals: Judge Orders U of M to Turn Over Public Records
by Dr. Heidi Greger
MINNEAPOLIS - Eight months after ARC filed suit against the University of Minnesota for release of public records, Hennepin County Judge Myron Greenberg ordered the University to disclose the forms (research protocols) that show how animals are used in experiments. The judge ruled that under Minnesota’s open-records law the University must turn over both approved and unapproved animal research protocols. The judge also ordered the University’s Animal Care Committee, which reviews and approves all experiments using animals, to provide uncensored copies of its agendas and meeting minutes.
Throughout the lawsuit the University maintained that the information in these documents constituted private personnel data and/or trade secrets. Judge Greenberg however, disagreed and ruled that, although some information from the protocols could be censored as trade secrets, the definition of trade secret is much narrower than the University was claiming. Judge Greenberg will retain jurisdiction in this case should disputes arise over what the University attempts to censor.
It appears that ARC is not the only onewise to the shenanigans going on in the laboratories at the University: the National Institutes of Health recently labeled the University an “exceptional organization.” “Exceptional” in this case means that the University will be subject to increased scrutiny by the NIH as a penalty for what the NIH called “a failure of university controls and proper accounting procedures” in the research program. The NIH also indicated there was “a general, institution-wide breakdown of internal control systems that are not isolated to a particular department.” Is it any wonder the University fought long and hard to keep certain documents from ever seeing the light of day?
Marshall Tanick, ARC’s attorney in this lawsuit, called the court’s decision “a victory for public accountability.” But we at ARC know that the real victory is for the animals: this win constitutes another step toward ending the torture and misery suffered by thousands of animals in the University’s laboratories each and every day under the guise of science.
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc
Woman Arrested For Breaking Into Prison
WILMINGTON, Del, Oct 29 (Reuter) - A woman was arrested for trying to break into a Delaware prison to see an inmate, the local Department of Correction said.
Spokeswoman Gail Stallings said the woman, Cheryl Carter, became “belligerent’’ when denied permission to see a friend because she did not have an appointment.
She brandished a knife and rammed her car into the fence of the prison at the Smyrna facility, about 30 miles south of Wilmington,a town north-east of Washington.
Police removed her from her car at gunpoint and charged Carter with reckless endangering, criminal trespassing and criminal mischief. About $25,000 damage was caused to the fence.
The inmate Carter was trying to see was sleeping at the time of the unscheduled visit and was not involved in the incident, Stallings said.
Minnesota Says No to Mourning Dove Hunting
Although mourning doves have been protected in Minnesota since 1946, the State Legislature tried again this year to allow a mourning dove hunting season. The legislation passed two Senate Committees, but the Senate voted 38 to 20 against it.
Thanks to all the ARC members who called and wrote their legislators on this issue, and special thanks to FATE (Friends of Animals and Their Environment) Issues Coordinator Linda Hatfield, who spent countless hours working to protect these gentle birds from sport hunters!
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.
CHARGES DISMISSED OVER CITY PROSECUTOR’S OBJECTIONS
ST. PAUL - Over the city’s objections, Judge James Campbell on October 23 dismissed trespassing charges against Dr. Heidi Greger, president of the Animal Rights Coalition, and Charlotte Cozzetto, Animal Rights Coalition board member. Greger and Cozzetto were arrested and charged with trespassing on July 5 after they blocked a University of Minnesota truck from entering the St. Paul Animal Control Center to buy unclaimed dogs and cats for experimentation (a practice known as pound seizure).
Mark S. Wernick, attorney for the defendants, made a motion to dismiss the charges “in the interests of justice.” Although the court technically has the authority to exercise this power, in an unusual disposition over the city prosecutor’s objections, the judge accepted the motion. Judge Campbell cited the St. Paul City Council’s recent passage of a resolution to violate the state pound seizure law by asking the pound to discontinue releasing abandoned pets for experimentation and the support of politicians such as St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman for efforts to repeal the pound seizure law at the next session of the Legislature.
The judge stated that the issue of the University’s purchase of pound animals “leading to the untimely deaths of these animals” should be resolved in the Legislature.
The Animal Rights Coalition, and the vast majority of the people who contacted the St. Paul City Council, believe it is wrong to use former pets as laboratory tools. If not placed with responsible owners, these animals should be humanely euthanized. Contrary to the University’s claim that its use and subsequent euthanasia of pound animals is no different from an animal’s euthanasia at the pound, unclaimed pets used by the University are subjected to the stress of transportation, handling, and confinement for an unspecified period of time before they are used in experiments. These animals may be stockpiled and in effect, warehoused, at the University for indeterminate periods of time before their ordeal is over. Also, contrary to University claims that it does not knowingly use former pets for experimentation, a recent review of University and pound records proves otherwise; many animals sold to the University were wearing collars or dragging leashes when picked up by the pound.
Minnesota is one of only three states that still has a pound seizure law, which allows pounds to sell unclaimed animals for experimentation upon request. Since March 9,1995, the St. Paul Pound has turned over at least 85 dogs and cats to the University of Minnesota for experimentation. The University last purchased animals from the St. Paul Pound in 1989, but discontinued the practice after meeting public opposition. The City of Minneapolis has refused to release pound animals for experimentation since 1986, and in 1989 the Minneapolis City Council passed a resolution to continue the ban, a decision which the University chose not to challenge. In St. Paul, the Humane Society of Ramsey County does not give or sell animals to research.
The Animal Rights Coalition and other local animal activists will appeal to the Legislature next year to repeal the Minnesota pound-seizure law.
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.
Elephant Rides: No Fun for the Elephant
by Charlotte Cozetto
Last summer, Prairie View shopping center in Eden Prairie and Colonial Square in Wayzata sponsored free elephant rides. ARC organized demonstrations at both malls and encouraged its members to contact the malls’ management company.
I attended both demonstrations and watched as Ruth, an African elephant from Jo-Don Farms of Franksville, Wisconsin, gave rides for hours on the hot asphalt parking lot, with no shade of any kind and very little water. Round and round she went in tiny circles, periodically prodded behind the feet and around the ears by her trainer’s sharp pointed elephant hook when she balked at continuing. When the rides ended, she was loaded into a coffin-like trailer with only a few small windows for ventilation.
I left both demonstrations saddened by the plight of Ruth, yet hopeful for change because several of the retailers I spoke to said they would never agree to having elephant rides again. ARC has since obtained information from the USDA which confirms our worst fears about Jo-Don Farms.
The following is an excerpt from an affidavit contained in the USDA file:
I give this voluntary statement to K. James Carter who has identified himself to me as an Investigator with the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Regulatory Enforcement. I work part time for Craig Perry, Walker, Iowa who owns and operates Perry’s Wilderness Ranch, Walker, Iowa. Approximately the middle of May 1991, Craig Perry asked me to go to Don Meyer’s in Franksville, Wisconsin with him for two weeks, while Don Meyer was finishing the training of an elephant, that he (Craig) had bought from Dave Meeks, Welford, South Carolina. Upon arrival at Don Meyer’s facility, we went to the elephant barn. We saw that the elephant (Teaha) had open wounds on its legs and multiple wounds on its body. We asked Don Meyer’s what happened to the elephant, he said the wounds were due to her pulling on the leg chains and the elephant fighting to get away and hitting the grating around the pen it is in. The next morning we went to the elephant barn. They (Don Meyer’s) were to show us how the elephant was being trained. They were using baseball bats and ax handles. When they were trying to get the elephant to do leg responses and the elephant did not respond, they would beat her with baseball bats and ax handles. When this did not do any good, they got out what they called the 110. This 110 was an ax handle with an electrical cord wrapped around it, with two bare wires at the upper end of the ax handle and fastened to two screws. The other end was plugged into a 110 volt electric outlet. When the elephant did not respond to their training methods, they would shock her with the 110 electrical cord. When we asked Don Meyer’s again about this type of abuse training of the elephant (Teaha) he said that this was the behind the scenes training of an elephant.ARC has forwarded copies of the USDA file to the malls’ management company and selected retailers at both malls. Hopefully, their eyes will be opened by this information.
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.
Enforcing Animal Cruelty Laws: A Hit or Miss Proposition
In a true miscarriage of justice, Ramsey County District Judge Gregg Johnson sentenced Yvonne Lee in late November to only one year’s probation. Mrs. Lee was charged with animal cruelty after she tied her 18-month old dog JR to the back of her truck and dragged him for at least three blocks at a speed of over 30 miles per hour.
Mrs. Lee pled guilty to one count of animal cruelty. In addition to probation, she was given a minimal fine and ordered to take dog training lessons and to perform 80 hours of community service at the Humane Society of Ramsey County. And perhaps most shocking, Judge Johnson allowed JR to be returned to Mrs. Lee after he had been treated for his injuries.
In contrast, the city of Eden Prairie showed that it takes animal abuse seriously when it recently prosecuted Eden Prairie resident Karl Pemberton for the abuse and torture of two cats, Talon and Scrunt. According to the police report, Pemberton repeatedly slammed Talon’s tail in a door, placed him in scalding hot water, and threw him off a 30-foot deck several times. After Talon died, Pemberton cut off his head, legs, and tail, slit open his underside, and gutted him. Pemberton was sentenced by a Hennepin County judge on September 26 to serve 10 days in the workhouse and to pay restitution.
What you can do:
Call Judge Johnson at (612) 266-8203 and protest his lenient treatment of Yvonne Lee. Also call prosecuting attorney Steve Christie at (612) 266-8740 and the Mayor’s complaint line at (612) 266-8989. Tell Christie and Mayor Coleman that St. Paul needs to take animal abuse seriously and to give the enforcement of anti-cruelty laws a higher priority.
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.
Humane Education Gaining Acceptance in the Schools
by Dr. Heidi Greger
For the third year in a row ARC exhibited at the Minnesota Education Association/Minnesota Federation of Teachers Professional Conference to encourage compassion and humane education in school curricula. Our focus was on alternatives to dissection, and we distributed a multitude of grade-specific material on the subject. The response from teachers and students alike was so positive we were concerned we would run out of material within the first few hours of the conference! In addition to the pamphlets, brochures, and anti-dissection resource catalogs we offered to conference attendees, the software program Visifrog was on display, providing an interactive teaching tool designed to educate students about the anatomy and physiology of the frog without requiring the frog to give up his/her life. We also showed the video “Classroom Cutups,” which exposes the truth about how biological supply companies obtain and treat “specimens” for use in school dissection classes. Perhaps the high point of the day came when a seventh grader watching the video commented, “After seeing this, I don’t think I’ll be dissecting.” Indeed, the truth shall set the animals free.
ARC expanded its educational outreach program this year by participating in the Minnesota Science Teachers Association Conference for the first time. Countless science teachers stopped by our booth offering encouraging comments and requesting information on how they could convince their students not to dissect! Even more heartening was that the teachers were primarily concerned with the ethics of dissection and how best to convey a compassionate viewpoint to their students. Despite the high cost of participating in these educational events, ARC believes our presence is vital at such conferences. We must continue to be a strong and resounding voice for the animals by protecting the “life” in the life sciences. If you agree that this outreach effort is a valuable undertaking, please consider signing up as a staffer at one or both of these conferences next year. Your support and participation will ensure that ARC’s message of compassion is spread far and wide.
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.
Light Burning Out For Tigers - WWF
By Philippe Naughton
GENEVA (Reuter) - Wild tigers, once the undisputed kings of the jungle, are disappearing at the rate of one a day and now stand on the verge of extinction, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said.
In a report, Tigers in the Wild, WWF said habitat destruction and increased poaching for skins and body parts meant the global tiger population could be as low as 4,600.
Three tiger sub-species, the Bali, Javan and Caspian, have already been driven into extinction this century.
“Tragically, the remaining five sub-species are at risk of meeting the same fate. The tiger faces an onslaught of poaching throughout its range,” said the report, written by WWF experts Elizabeth Kemf and Peter Jackson.
Wild tigers are still found in 13 Asian countries, including India and China, as well as Russia.
The U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) forbids international trade in tiger parts such as bones, which are coveted for use in traditional Chinese medicines, but WWF said poaching was continuing.
In India, home to two-thirds of the world’s tigers, the government is waging a battle against poachers. Contraband tiger bones and skins seized last year were estimated to account for 73 tigers, but WWF estimated that 300-400 may have been lost out of a possible total of 3,000.
The tigers of Indochina have been hit both by loss of their forest home and poaching for traditional medicines, which are used in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea and even exported to the United States and Europe.
Cambodia, which has a tiger population of between 100 and 300, has sold two-thirds of remaining tiger forests to logging concessions and tigers are being killed there at the rate of two to three a month, the report says.
The species most at risk of extinction are the South China tiger, of which less than 50 remain in the wild, and the Siberian tiger, whose numbers have halved over the past five years to around 200.
One problem for conservationists is that Chinese demand for tiger part imports has been rising over the past decade as domestic stocks declined. The killing of 3,000 tigers as pests in the 1950s and 1960s had provided large stocks in China.
The authors of the report say counting tigers is notoriously difficult - the big cats live secretly in dense forests and often the only sign of their presence is a scratch on a tree.
According to their best estimate the global total is between 4,600 and 7,200, but tigers struggle for living space despite their slight numbers. In India, where 60 percent of the world’s wild tigers roam, human population has increased by 50 percent over the last 20 years.
“If the demand for tiger products can be eliminated and anti-poaching measures stepped up until tiger populations are restored, conservationists can prevent one of conservation’s most important symbols from its imminent fate: extinction early in the next century,” the report said.
“Small numbers of tigers could linger on for some decades, but the species would die off slowly...Like the tiger itself, we must fight for its survival.”
ST. PAUL RESIDENTS ASK THE CITY TO STOP SELLING FAMILY PETS FOR EXPERIMENTATION
ST. PAUL - Citizens Against Pound Seizure, a coalition of concerned citizens, pet owners, and humane organizations, will testify before a meeting of the Operations Committee of the St. Paul City Council They will ask the City to stop the sale of unclaimed pound animals to the University of Minnesota, (Minnesota’s pound seizure law allows pounds to sell unclaimed animals for experimentation upon request, a practice known as pound seizure.)
Since March 9,1995, the St. Paul Pound has turned over at least 85 dogs and cats to the University of Minnesota for experimentation. The University last purchased animals from the St. Paul Pound in 1989, but discontinued the practice after meeting public opposition. The City of Minneapolis has refused to release pound animals for experimentation since 1986, and in 1989 the Minneapolis City Council passed a resolution to continue the ban. In St. Paul, the Humane Society of Ramsey County does not give or sell animals to research.
Citizens Against Pound Seizure believes it is wrong to use former pets as laboratory tools. These animals should be placed with responsible owners or humanely euthanized.
On May 12, Timberwolves star Christian Laettner’s dog was rescued from a research lab at the University. Chief, a shepherd-husky mix, was picked up by the St. Paul Pound and later sold to the University. Chief was recognized only after a photo of him appeared in a news story. While this story had a happy ending, it is not typical of the fate of most dogs and cats sold to the University. Most people will not have a news story printed about their missing pet or be able to offer a large reward for their pet’s return. As long as the St. Paul Pound continues to sell animals to the University, these beloved companions will go to their deaths - often after enduring lengthy and painful experiments - without ever seeing their families again.
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.
Vegetarian Mascot Battles Texas
DALLAS (Reuter) - “Chris P. Carrot’’, a new mascot that animal rights activists hope will promote vegetarian eating habits, found his first foray into Texas cattle country tougher than expected.
Armed with buttons reading “Meat Stinks’’, the 7-foot-tall orange carrot character was turned away from at least one elementary school while the principal of another warned students not to talk to strangers when he waddled in, animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said in a news release.
PETA said the carrot would continue its “Eat Your Veggies, Not Your Friends’’ campaign outside school areas if authorities ban him from school grounds.
Among the leaflets Chris P. Carrot is ready to distribute to Texas schoolchildren is one reading “Hamburgers are really cows who have been separated from their families and killed. Bacon and bologna are really little piggies who are taken in crowded, smelly trucks to their death.’’
Two Donkeys Chased, Killed by Thugs in Texas
FORT WORTH, Texas, (Reuter) - Texas police said Thursday they were looking for a gang of thugs who beat two small donkeys to death.
The pet donkeys were killed after being chased around their one acre lot on the outskirts of Fort Worth Monday.
“They were chased and beaten. The female fell to the ground from heat exhaustion but they continued to beat on her,’’ police officer Billy Robison said.
He said the male donkey was also hit with clubs and was “chased into a pole, which broke his neck.’’
Robison said police have offered a $1,000 reward for anyone coming forward with information leading to an arrest, and $5,000 if it leads to a conviction.
To BST Or Not To BST?
By Christopher Wilson
MONTPELIER, Vt (Reuter) - Amid Vermont’s bucolic landscape of autumn leaves and red barns a bitter argument has been raging for months over the purity of the milk produced by the black-and-white cows that are a symbol of the state.
Vermont legislators weighed in to settle the issue with a law requiring all products from cows treated with bovine somatotropin (BST), a synthetic hormone used to boost milk production, be labeled with a blue dot.
It was the first time in America that any such law has been enacted mandating that a genetically engineered food product be labeled on grocery store shelves. The law is likely to reverberate across the United States to Brussels where the European Commission determinedly maintains a ban on BST use.
Monsanto, the maker of synthetic BST, estimates that 13,000 dairy producers, 11 percent of the total in the United States, are currently using BST, which is just one of a host of new synthetic compounds produced in the brave new world of transgenics. More and more farm animals are being “altered’’ by biotechnology and more of the fruits of genetic engineering are headed to supermarket shelves and into our daily diet.
Scientists and biotech companies believe the technology is unstoppable, that transgenic goats and pigs will be commonplace and that disease-resistant potatoes and cotton represent a huge boon to the farmers of the future.
In Vermont, however, ordinary people seem more confused about BST than before the blue dots started appearing.
“The law has no basis in science and is no lesson in consumer protection,’’ said Roberta MacDonald, a vice-president of Cabot Creamery. “This law says that the United States is afraid of the genetics that is most holy in our future.’’
Vermont dairy farmers, who produce about 85 percent of the agricultural output of this rural state, do not take kindly to being told what to do. “It’s a crock of manure,’’ said one, who believes farmers should have the choice of whether to use new biotech tools like BST as long as they are not harmful.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), after intensive investigation, has ruled that BST is safe for humans and cows and that milk from BST-injected cows is “indistinguishable’’ from milk from those not treated.
Nonetheless, some influential voices, including Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc - the trendy, socially concious Vermont ice-cream maker - shun BST, which is also known as recombinant bovine growth hormone, or rBGH.
“rBGH poses a threat to the physical health of dairy cows and will seriously undermine the financial health of small, family-owned dairy farms, and is simply unnecessary,’’ Ben & Jerry’s said in a policy statement.
The problem is Ben & Jerry’s and fans of its ice cream have no way of knowing whether their “Rain Forest Crunch’’ or “Cherry Garcia’’ come from an animal treated with BST or not.
BST is a naturally occuring hormone in cows and there are no tests to distinguish the natural hormone from its synthetic clone, made by Monsanto under the brand Posilac. So Vermont’s new labelling law relies heavily on the honesty of farmers to disclose whether BST has been used.
“It’s up to the word of the farmers and sometimes the producers may not even know,’’ said Cabot Creamery’s MacDonald. “It (BST) can be used on some of the critters in a herd some of the time. Until there’s a test, the law is ludicrous.’’
Even some state officials agree.
“As a regulator I have great difficulty with this law as you cannot test the product and it’s as easy to obtain as a bottle of asprin at the local pharmacy. It’s a very difficult law to police,’’ admits Byron Moyer, the supervisor of dairy production at Vermont’s Department of Agriculture.
But for many people, the BST issue has more to do with economics, politics and social issues than with health.
The fear is that use of BST by big mid-Western dairy farms could boost milk production to such an extent that the small family farms in Vermont could be driven out of busines, with drastic consequences for the local economy and for tourism.
“This product has the potential to change Vermont agriculture as we know it,’’ Moyer cautioned. “The issue here is not so much a biotechnology issue, it’s a fear that this product could increase the productivity and the economic advantages that the large dairymen have over the small dairy.’’
Industry sources say economics may also be the reason the European Union, representing member states that heavily subsidize agriculture, is reluctant to introduce BST out of concern that it could lead to lakes of surplus milk.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand have also instituted moratoria on the use of BST.
“Europe and Canada subsidize farmers, unlike in the United States,’’ MacDonald said. “So for them to allow a technology that would produce more milk doesn’t make sense.’’
Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA
“Hope Chest in the Attic” captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family.
“Chain Smoking” depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. “The room of the rape” is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.
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Turkey Beats Oven, But Price is High
LONDON (Reuter) - Committed vegetarian Linda McCartney has paid $4,600 to save a prize turkey from the dinner table.
The wife of the former Beatle Paul McCartney bought the bird at a charity auction where the champion turkey is normally snapped up every year by a restaurateur.
McCartney, who markets her own range of vegetarian dishes, said after the sale: “Everybody should think about doing something like this at Christmas.’’
Toxic Solvent Dumped Into Gulf of Mexico
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas, April 5 (Reuter) - The crew of a Norwegian tanker accidentally dumped more than 18,000 gallons (68,140 litres) of a toxic solvent into the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Coast Guard said.
The spilled chemical, which was used as a dry-cleaning solvent among other things, was discharged on Wednesday by crewmen who thought they were flushing out an empty holding tank, a spokesman with the tanker operator said.
“It was a human error when it came to cleaning a tank that they thought was empty,’’ said John Salvesen, a spokesman with Oilfield Tankers USA of Houston.
The heavy, clear liquid solvent was spilled in a shrimping area of the Gulf about 18 miles (29 km) off Matagorda Island. The solvent was expected to sink quickly to the sea floor in water up to 90 feet (27 metres) deep.
“I don’t believe there is going to be a lot of fish kill for the simple reason it is as heavy as it is and is so far offshore,’’ Salveson said of the chemical tetrachloroethylene.
The spill was from the tanker Bow Sun, which is operated by Oilfield Tankers, U.S. agent for owner Skibsaksjeselskapet Storli A/S of Minde, Norway, he said.
Federal and state environmental crews have monitored the spill for the past two days. Those crews were already in the gulf tracking remnants of a 200,000-gallon (757,100-litres) fuel oil spill that has left a slick of congealed oil floating offshore.
the new livestock policy
A POLICY OF ECOCIDE OF INDIGENOUS CATTLE BREEDS AND A POLICY OF GENOCIDE FOR INDIA’S SMALL FARMERS
by Dr.Vandana Shiva
The Livestock Policy Perspective 1995-2020 developed by the Government of India and the Swiss Development Cooperation is a policy for the destruction of India’s farm animal biodiversity and a threat to the survival of small farmers who depend on a diversity based decentralised livestock economy.
India’s livestock legacy has four unique dimensions :-
* 1. Cows and bulls are treated as sacred and hence are protected.
* 2 The conservation of farm animals is essential for the sustainability of agriculture and the survival of small farmers.
* 3. The conservation and utilisation of farm animals is based on diversity - both diversity of breeds as well as diversity offunction of farm animals
* 4. The sustenance of cattle comes from diverse sources of fodder and feed - agricultural by products such as straw and oil cake, fodder trees planted on farms and common property resources such a village pastures and forests.
Thus, the indigenous approach to livestock is based on diversity, decentralisation, sustainability and equity. Our cattle are not just milk machines or meat machines. They are sentient beings who serve human communities through their multidimensional role in agriculture.
On the other hand, extemally driven projects, programmes and policies emerging ftom industrial societies treat cattle as one-dimensional machines which are maintained with capital intensive and environmentally intensive inputs and which provide a single output - either milk or meat. Polices based on this approach are characterised by monocultures, concentration and centralisation, non-sustainability and inequality.
The new livestock policy has been framed in this paradigm of machines and monocultures. It is a serious attack on principles of diversity, decentralisation, sustainability and equity in the livestock sector.
The Cattle Economy: The Provider for the Poor.
The policy document recognises that the livestock economy is the economy of the poorest households in India.
As stated in Section 2.3: About 630 million people reside in rural areas (74% of total population) of which 40% have incomes which place them below the poverty line. Some 70 million hou seholds (73% of total rural households) keep and own livestock of one kind or another and derive on avera:ge 20% of their income from this source. Small and marginal fanners and landless tabourers constitute almost two-thirds of these livestock keeping households. The importance of the livestock sector can therefore not be measured purely in terms of its contribution to GDP but it plays a very crucial role in generating income and employment for the weaker sections of the economy. Rapid growth of the livestock sector can be a dedding factor in the efforts at improving nutrition and relieving poverty. Women provide nearly 90% of all labour for livestock management.
However, all the analysis in the policy is totally insensitive to the systems which allow cattle to serve the needs of the poorest. As a result the recommendations are a direct assault on this survival base of the poor.
An Assault on the Culture of Conservation.
The livestock policy paper is disrespectful to the Indian culture of reverence for farm animals. These cultural beliefs are viewed as block to promoting meat production. At a time when meat consumption is going down in western countries themselves, India’s livestock policy is trying to convert a predominantly vegetarian society into a beef eating culture. In the U.S.. beef consumption per capita has declined from 88.9 pounds in 1976 to 63.9 pounds in 1990. Cultural attitudes have been the most significant reason for maintaining vegetarian diets for the large majority in India. The livestock policy would like to undern-dne these conservation policies to promote a meat culture.
As stated in Section 2.10 on Medt Production: The beef production in India is purely an adjunct to milk and draught power production. The animals slaughtered are the old and the infirm and the sterile and are in all cases malnourished. There is no organized marketing and no grading system and beef prices are at a level which makes feeding uneconomic. There is no instance of feedlots or even individual animals being riased for meat. Religious sentiments (particularly in the Northern and Westem parts of India) against cattle slaughter seem to spill over also on buffaloes and prevent the utilization of a large number of surplus male calves.
The policy then recommends government interventions to stimulate meat production even though this will totally undem-dne the basis of sustainable agriculture. (Section 3.10)
Undermining Sustainability of Agriculture.
The economics of meat exports is totally flawed in a diversity based culture of animal husbandry and farming. Two thirds and more of the power requirements of Indian villages are met by the 80 million work animals. Indian cattle excrete 700 n-dllion tons of recoverable manure. Half of which is used as fuel, saving 27 millions of kerosene, 35 million tons of coal or 68 million tons of wood. The remaining half is used as fertiliser.
As Maneka Gandhi has shown in the case of one export slaughter house, the value of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium provided annually by living cattle is fifty times more than the animal earnings from meat exports, which at current rates of slaughter will wipe out Indian farm animals in 10-15 years. If animals are allowed to live, we will get 19,18,562 tonnes of farmyard manure with the help of their dung and urine.
The livestock policy has nothing to say on the role of animals in the maintenance of sustainability in agriculture. In fact, the livestock policy if implemented would convert cow dung from a source of fertility into a major source of pollution since intensive factory farming of cattle for beef leads to concentration of organic waste from livestock in one place. Since such intensive production is not integrated and cannot be integrated with agriculture as in the case of small farms with decentralised livestock economies, the animal waste turns into a pollutant. Nitrogen from cattle waste is converted into Ammonia and Nitrates which leach into and pollute the surface and ground water. A feedlot of 10,000 cattle produces. as mudi waste as a city of 110,000 people. This is the reason the Netherlands has been exporting its toxic cow dung to India and is unable to reintegrate this animal waste into its own agricultural systems. Cow dung is a fertilizer only in small scale integrated farn-dng systems. In large scale concentrated and specialised factory farn-Ling systems, this wealth is converted into a hazardous waste. Further, since intensive factory farming of cattle goes hand in hand with intensive feeding and feed production which in tum requires heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides, the cattle waste from factory farms is very heavily contaminated with chemicals.
Animal Energy.
While in decentralised small scale animal husbandry, cow dung is the most significant gift of the cow to sustainable agriculture, there is total neglect of the contribution of cattle to renewal of soil fertility in the livestock policy. While reference is made to draught power, it is only with the objective of wiping out this source of sustainable energy production, without recognising that ff animals were replaced by tractors in India we would have to spend more than a thousand million US dollars annually on fossil fuels, worsening our debt crisis and our balance of payment. In total indifference to the huge economic costs to both farmers and the country generated by substituting animal energy by fossil fuel run mechanical energy, the livestock policy blindly proposes such a shift.
As Section 2.4 on Drought Power: The. number of work animals continued to increase through 1977 but has since fallen by about 10 million to a level of 70 million in 1987 of which 9% are ;buffaloes. To ensure replacement every sixth year one needs about 0.67 breedable cows per bullock. The bullocks have been largely replaced by mechanical means in transport and irrigation and are now almost exclusively u@ for land preparation. How much of the gross cropped area (180 m ha) that is cultivated by animal power is uncertain (an estimate of 60 m ha is given in a recent WB report) but it is clear that the bullocks may only be utilized for a short period of the year (at most 100 days). Since bullocks generally are not put out to grazing except possibly during the slack season, feeding them and the necessary replacement stock imposes a major strain. Crossbreds are generally not appreciated as bullocks. Although there are opportunities to introduce improved bullock genes in F2 and subsequent crosses these are seldom utilized. In larger herds one may use some cows for crossbreeding while others are used for bullock (and marginal milk) production. In smaller herds one can however not separately pursueboth the power and the dairy objective.
The policy of upgrading bullocks and introducing improved implements has met with limited success (some implements like the seeder has been introduced). Where the field sizes, topography etc. allow the farmer has the choice between keeping his own bullocks (and the stock needed for their replacement), disposing of the bullocks and either hire power for cultivation (animal or tractor) with the consequent risk that the timeliness of operations will suffer, or acquiring a tractor and offer its service for transport and cultivation. We have only lin-dted material that illustrates the relative attractiveness of these options for different farm sizes with due consideration to the importance of timeliness of land preparation (see however Sharma and Binswanger). The trend is obviously away from animal power.
As stated in Section 5.2 on Interventions: with respect of animal power further adds, ff our aim, as suggested, is to accelerate the trend towards mechanization as well as to promote upgrading of bullock power and improvement of implements we will need to consider interventions for this purpose. In order to accelerate mechanization one may consider providing credit for tractor (incl.equipment) procurementand to make sure (through training programs and subsidy) that theweaker sections get a fair chance to exploit this opportunity. At a time when as a result of the climate change crisis we should be moving away from fossil fuel use to sustainable sources of energy, the livestock policy recon-unends the reverse. It also neglects the fact that even in the affluent state of Punjab, farmers are shifting back from tractors to bullocks because the tractors have become too expensive to operate due to rise in fuel prices. The flawed one-dimensional, linear and monoculture logic.
The livestock policy is based on a flawed logic of one dimensionality and linearity. One dimensional thinking is based on perceiving cattle as linear and mechanical input-output systems with a single function, single output usually limited to milk or meat. Linearity is displayed in treating these inputs and outputs as linear flows. On this one dimensional and linearlogic, it that India’s 70 mfllion work animals have to be fed and managed over a “365 day feeding year” while they give a “100 day working year”. On the basis of this flawed logic it is then stated that these “inefficient”
work animals can become progressively redundant to the farming sector and cattle population can be reduced to one third of what it is.
This concept of efficiency applied to cattle is totally misplaced. Firstly, for most rural families, animals are part of their extended families and are not mere work machines. if this logic of efficiency had to be applied to humans, we too should be totally annihilated and replaced by robots because humans are “inefficient” as they have to be looked after in childhood and old age and during ill health, while they “work” only in adult life and during healthy periods. Treating humans and animals as if they weremere machines with an externally defined single function is ethically outrageous and economically flawed.
Secondly, in any case, in India, farm animals are not single output, single function machines. They have many functions only one of which is to providework energy. Even when work animals are not pulling ploughs or bullock carts they are giving manure, the most significant contribution that cattle make to agriculture. Thirdly, a comparative energy audit of inputs and useful outputs from U.S. cattle and Indian cattle shows that Indian cattle are far more efficient than their counterparts in industrial economies in using energy. They use 29 per cent of organic matter provided to them, and 22 percent of the energy and 3 per cent of the protein in contrast to 9, 7 and 5 per cent respectively in the intensive cattle industry in the U.S. Indian cattle provide food in the exc@ss of the edible food consumed, in contrast to the U.S. where 6 times as much* edible food is fed to the cattle as is obtained from them.
It is this wasteful and inefficient system of livestock management that the new livestock policy introduced in India in the name of improving “efficiency” of cattle.
Undermining Farm Animal Biodiversity.
The Biodiversity Convention obliges all member states to protect biodiversity. This includes farm animal biodiversity- India’s indigenous livestock policy has been based on a wide diversity of cattle breeds. They are high milk yielders like the Gir, Sindhi, Sahiwal and Deoni. They are dual purpose breeds such as the Haryana, Ongole, Gaolao, Krishna Valley, ‘Ibarparkar, Kankrej. Finally there are specialised draught animals such as Nagori, Bachour, Kenkatha, Malvi, Kherigarh, Hallikar, Amritmohal, Kangayam, Khillari etc.
The livestock policy document totally fails to address the issue of conservation of animal biodiversity. The policy is indirectly writing a death certificate
for indigenous breeds which have been evolved as dual purpose breeds for both dairy and drought power or a specialised draught animals. By a one dimensional focus on dairy and meat alone, and a deliberate destruction of the animal energy economy, the policy tadtly promotes the replacement of diverse indigenous breeds by uniform breeds from Europe. One-dimensional thinking thus leads to a monoculture of farm animals bred and maintained through extemal imported inputs for an export oriented economy.
Aggravating the Fodder Crisis.
The primary reason for decline of cattle is the shortage of fodder. The fodder crisis has three roots - one lies in agriculture policy based on Green Revolution technolgoies which undermined the sources of fodder from agricultural crops. Mgh Yielding Varieties were bred for grain and led to decline in fodder.
The second source of the fodder crisis lies in aid programmes such as “social forestry” and “farm forestry” projects which promoted the planting of monocultures of non-fodder species such as Eucalyptus, thus aggravating the shortage of fodder.
Finally, the enclosure of the commons has also led to scardty of grazing lands and pastures. In addition there has been a scarcity of cattle feed both because traditional sources of cattle feed such as oil cakes have declined as a result of the Green Revolution which displaced oil seeds and because new sources sudi as soya bean cake are largely exported. The Agricultural Minister recently announced that he wanted a special port set up for the export of soya bean cake. Industrial countries such as Netherlands use seven times more land than their own in Third World countries for fodder and feed to provide inputs to their intensive factory farming. The livestock policy does recognise the crisis of fodder and feed in India but fails to provide solutions. In fact, by promoting intensive factory farming, it is indirectly proposing a system that will intensify the pressure on land, divert land from food for people to food to animals and further erode the scarce environmental resources of the country.
As Section 2.7 states: The feed and fodder resources are of course shared by all livestock. Lactating cows and bullocks receive preferential treatment while sheep and goats, dry and unproductive animals and backyard poultry to a large extent have to fend for themselves. Agricultural residues are currently estimated to provide 40%, grazing 31% green fodder (cut and cultivated) 26%, and grain and concentrates (mainly for conunercial poultry and high producing cows) 3% of total consumption.’Over the last decade the straw grain ratio has deteriorated because of the large scale adoption of high yielding varieties which also produce poorer quality straw.
As Section 2.8 states: The amount of common property grazing land has deteriorated sharply from 78m ha in 1950-51 to 55 m ha in 1988-89 (admittedly very crude estimates) together with the quality of grazing in the remaining areas. This has been at least partly compensated by encroachment into reserved forest areas (67m ha) a large proportion of which (probably more than 50%) now exhibit serious degradation (other factors than grazing may have contributed to this state of affairs). Cultivated green fodder is estimated at 7 million ha and is gaining in importance (particularly in the NW). The nutritional constraints in dairy production are very real and the conditions under which stall-feeding, concentrate feeding and cultivated fodder become viable options are not very clear.
There is no recommendation in the policy that would improve the natural resource and environmental base for ameliorating the fodder scarcity. Steps in this direction would include:
a) shift to agricultural crops and crop varieties that produce food for both animals and humans. For eg. our seed conservation programme - Navdanya has shown that high fodder yielding varieties are the most popular among fanners.
b) Shift to fodder trees ‘m agroforestry and sociil forestry programmes
c) recover and rejunevate the commons
d) stop export of cattle feed.
The policy perspective has no reconunendations with respect to (a, b and d) above. With respect to c, it recommends the opposite of what the environment movement has been saying.
As Section 3.4 states:
We are doubtful about the chances of success in relation to the village common (panchayat) lands and would not recommend any major effort to establish management for and to regenerate this resource.
The Government Livestock Policy developed in collaboration with the Swiss Development Corporation is thus the opposite of what an ecologically sound animal husbandry policy should be given the information we now have about the ecological and social externalities of intensive factory farming of animals. Instead of promoting the conservation of indigenous breeds of cattle, the policy presaibes the wiping out of local breeds. Instead of reducing dependence on fossil fuels, the policy recommends replacing ploughs and bullock carts %ith tractors. Instead of promoting reduction of meat eating it promotes increase of meat production. Instead of recovering the commons it suggests we should.let the commons disappear.
This is a prescription for wiping out biodiversity and worsening the climate change crisis. Both the Indian govermnent and the Swiss government are thus acting against their commitments made at the Earth Summit in Rio, in Agenda 21 as well as in the Biodiversity Convention and the Climate Change Convention.
The official policy needs to be totally revised to reflect people’s concem, goverranent obligations and full scientiflc and ecological knowledge that is available about the enviromnerital and econon-dc costs of large scale, centralised and intensive factory farming.
The People’s Ecological Agenda.
For the livestock policy to be ecologically sound and socially just the following elements must be urgently addressed.
1. Protection of native breeds and conservation of animal biodiversity
2. Strengthening the role of farm animals in sustainable agriculture
3. Stopping the slaughter of cattle for exports.
4. Stopping the export of oil cake and cattle feed
5. Preventing the import of environmentally unsound methods of intensive factory farming of animals which degrade and pollute the enviroranent and cause health hazards to consumers.
prose
...from
autumn reason
by sydney anderson
10-30-82 9 something a.m.
Boo. did I scare you? Here I sit, at my boring old office, wasting time because I don’t feel like doing work. I wish I was with you instead.
My friend Max is in town for a little while, he’s staying at the Hyatt, I don’t know why he’s there and I keep leaving voice mail for him but he hasn’t picked it up. I’ll be he doesn’t know that he has voice mail, that he doesn’t know how to use it. Geek. It’d be nice to see him again, if he ever gets the message that I called. I’m on the phone right now with an operator, and yeah, they probably don’t know how to use voice mail. but she said that as operators they have to tell them if they ever use their phone that they have x number of messages. But that means I have to wait for them to use the phone in order for them to be told that they have voice mail. Hope they get in and make a call.
Jared now keeps changing everything that I do. For the past three or four days I have given him a completed copy of the new catalog, and the next day every day he would give me the copy back with changes on almost every page. Yesterday he gave me a copy of the municipality flyer - the day it was going out to print - with changes on every single page. Crap like that takes a lot of time to do, especially when it’s a change like “add something here” instead of “change this word to x”. So I rushed around like an idiot all day trying to get it done on time. I gave him the stupid flyer weeks ago to stop that from happening. And if he changes around this new flyer any more, I think I’m going to just have to kill him. It’s that simple.
See, it all goes back to people not taking the time to figure out what they want on any given project. That so much time could be saved if people only thought coherently the first time. Then they wouldn’t waste the time and effort of a number of people after the job had been finished.
Thanks for listening to me bitch in all my recent letters. It’s just easy to get aggravated here. I’m supposed to be going out after work with everyone from work because it’s Barb’s last day here. Barb is the one who thought I looked 50 in my picture with you. She’s actually a big air-head, she can’t even figure out how to match her clothes (she had a pair of socks that were sky-blue colored with little white clouds on them, for instance), she’s got the really annoying voice... I really don’t like her much at all. Oh, boo-hoo. She’s leaving. Sorry to sound so rude, but I even have to chip in money for a going away gift certificate for her. So she can buy some more ugly clothes, I suppose.
I know they wouldn’t get me a going-away present. They wouldn’t even take me out.
Yeah, now that I think of it, what do you want for Christmas? I’m stumped.
12:05 p.m.
Hi. got a hold of Max. Will see him tomorrow night. I don’t even know if I’m going to see you tomorrow or not. Maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea, I mean, it’s a long drive for you for a short amount of time. I worry about accident-prone boy driving around so much, I shouldn’t want to make you drive the distance for such a short time, right? I do want to see you, though.
I just saved Jared a lot of money - a 12 page catalog someone else just did for them - 10,000 copies cost them $7,000. 17,000 copies of my 12 pg. catalog will cost them $6,100 - that’s almost half the price of the other ones - and it will probably end up looking better, too. He better like me.
I just compressed a bunch of their old programs and stuff they had on disks before I got here and I saved them a ton of computer space. I think it’s a blessing that they have me around, actually.
I’m dressed in orange and black today. wow, she got festive. Happy Halloween.
So I’m going out to a local bar (and I’m not frightened? Should I pack heat?) after work here for this woman’s last day. I want a beer. Then I’m going out with Susan to a party that her friends from work are holding. She’s going to the party as an expressway, wearing black and putting little matchbox cars all over her with the hood up or overturned. Creative. All I could think of that would be easy and not very costume-like would be to wear all black and a beret and go as the rhythm method of birth control. Just an idea.
11-16-82 9:17 a.m.
Hi. I’m back at work. Things are sometimes difficult to understand. I read a letter from Bob today (oh, you’ve met Bob a few times, he’s just a buddy from college). It was addressed to another person, but it was all about the things he has been going through for the past few years. He was so panicked in his letter that it makes me wonder if sometimes I am losing it. Sometimes I wonder if my mood swings verge on panic attacks. I don’t think so, because usually my mood swings are caused by something; I can understand why I’m feeling the way I do at any given time, even if the mood is extreme.
There are times when I want to take positive steps toward making me feel better, I want to take charge of my life again. And sometimes I feel as if there is nothing I can do, and my mood becomes more and more depressed and I feel like it’s never going to end. If I’m successful, my vacation time with you is a departure from my depression. I just wish I could be happy here.
Which means I have to try. I think I’m going to start today, when I get home from work. I’ll just have to avoid Catherine at all costs and do positive things for myself. Exercise. Read. I’m halfway through “The Power of Positive Thinking”; I should keep reading it. Listen to my meditation tapes. Burn some incense. Maybe I should burn a candle every once in a while.
I think I’m missing something, though. Something more mental, something that faces the problems I have more. All of these things I mentioned are stress relief methods, and reading may be construed as positive for helping me mentally and helping me get along with other people. But I need to keep thinking about how to get rid of the problems I have instead of learning how to cope with them. Some of them I shouldn’t have to cope with. Feelings about Catherine, or feelings about my sister or my father. I need to get them out more, to study them more, to understand them more and maybe to then I’d be able to put them to rest. I don’t know how to approach doing that, though.
I can’t afford a therapist. It’s that simple.
Maybe I should devote a certain amount of time every day to writing about things, things about my childhood, things about my family or whatever. It would get very personal.
Maybe I’ll write mine to you, if you want to listen. Or read. Or whatever. Maybe I’ll write an hour a day. Or a half hour. And I’ll have to write for at least that long. Maybe I’ll start now.
I remember sitting in the basement when I was little. I was really little, because mom was still around at this point. I stayed in there all the time, especially when dad was expected home, or home, you know. Mom always had a manhattan ready for him for when he got home. She’d put the glasses in the freezer so they were cold and the edges were frosted.
I remember him always being a beast when he got home. Didn’t talk much. You had to make sure you didn’t bother him when he first got home.
A lot of times I remember sitting in the basement crying, wishing it was Thursday, when dad didn’t come home from work. Thursdays were his night out with the guys, and I was in bed by the time he got home. I never had to see him on a Thursday.
Friday mornings weren’t so easy to handle, that’s when you tried not to get in his way, but usually he was sleeping in and I didn’t have to see him anyway.
Actually, I don’t think I saw him that much when I was little.
I just read the paragraph about sitting in the basement crying and I remembered that I’d think about dying then, too. Killing myself. I’d think of different ways to do it, getting a big knife, or taking pills. But I knew I wouldn’t like the pain, and the thought of dying scared me, too. What’s after it? Nothing? Can I really think of ending my existence forever? I’d probably screw up anyway and then be in pain and have to try to explain myself to my parents. I didn’t want to have to go through any of those things.
This is what I thought about when I was really little.
I knew I’d never really try to kill myself, I was too chicken. Maybe I wanted to scare them. Maybe I wanted them to realize how much they were hurting me. Maybe It would make them feel guilty, look, we didn’t pay any attention to her, and look what we’ve caused. If only we showed her we loved her, if only we paid her some attention, if only we made her feel like she was a worthwhile person...
That’s the one that always gets to me. They never made me feel like I was a worthwhile person.
Mom was never an affectionate type, she barely ever talked with me, she was just a mediator between everyone in the family, she just tried to smooth things over all the time. Usually didn’t work, although I probably would have been killed by dad if she wasn’t there. Or just abandoned.
Dad was never involved with any of my life. Only if I needed to be punished for something, If I did something wrong, dad had to know about it, and dad had to do something about it. She might have told him the good things I did, but if she did, I don’t think he remembered too many of them.
And then she left. I think all of the mediating got to her. One morning breakfast wasn’t ready, and by evening we found out she went to visit her sister. And so my sister took over the role of mother. And with that brought a whole new set of problems.
I remember how bad I felt when I got caught stealing. I was little. I didn’t feel bad about what I was doing, I figured the stores wouldn’t even miss these little things, besides, why shouldn’t I have them? If I could get them, more power to me, I suppose. It was when I got caught that I felt so bad, I knew I was in trouble, I had no idea what they were going to do to me, but I knew they were going to tell my dad. And I thought I was going to have this criminal record for the rest of my life. I was so afraid of what they might do to me. I didn’t want to see dad’s reaction. I was 12, I think. a stupid 12 year old stealing small things for Christmas presents. Where was I supposed to get the money to buy everyone Christmas presents? Why was I made to feel like I was supposed to but everyone Christmas presents? Everyone else was older, and working, I was young, and I had no way of getting any money. Too young to baby-sit or work, and they didn’t give me an allowance for cleaning or something. So my sister made me feel like I had to buy Christmas presents for everyone and I had no money. They all bought me things, things they could afford when they had an income.
Oh, I just cried and cried when I got home after stealing the stuff. I was so ashamed, I didn’t want anyone at school to know what I had done, I figured that every time my dad looked at me he was thinking I was a thief and that I failed him. I was a failure. Dad had to leave from playing cards at a local bar. I wonder if they knew, the people he was playing cards with, what was going on, but I didn’t even think about it. My dad must have been mortified. I kept apologizing, I kept crying the whole night. They drove me home, and everyone just told me to sit in my room and try to relax. I just needed to be by myself. I was up there crying, I think they came in every once in a while. I don’t remember what they said to me.
I think everyone realized that my own fear and pain were punishment enough.
I do remember a couple of days later I was walking up the stairs in the front hallway, and I almost bumped into dad by the door. He stopped, he kind of grabbed my face and said he was so disappointed in me. How could I do this to him?, he asked me, and he was crying. Then he just walked away.
Failure. I couldn’t do anything right. Nothing I did made anything better between us. He always had reason to hate me, to make me feel like I was worthless. Christ, I was just a kid.
I always liked to play in small cramped places. I liked playing in the basement, because at the time part of it was closed off with a bookshelf and it made the corner like a little room at the far end that was hard to see into from the door. It was my private space. I’d decorate it like it was my own home, and I always had private things, secret compartments and codes so no one could get to my stuff. I was very secretive. I even liked to play in my closet, because there was a shelf in the back of my closet used for storage I could sit in if it was empty. It was like my own private room, in my closet. I decorated the walls, put pillows in there for comfort. I always kind of hoped they didn’t know I played in there, that they didn’t know it even existed, that they could come looking for me and they wouldn’t know where I was.
I think I’m going to take a break from this for a while. It’s been over an hour, and I’m starting to run dry. I’ll write again. Thank you.
11-16-82 3:47 p.m.
Hi. I’ve had a relatively positive and productive day. That’s strange, because writing about when I stole stuff almost made me cry this morning. I’ve been dwelling on how aggravating it is living with Catherine, at a job I’m not too fond of, so having a happier day seems a little strange.
I leave here in less than an hour, and then I see my dad. He might take us out to dinner. If only I can stand the company.
I feel like I should continue on like I did this morning. That seemed to make me feel a little better, even though it made me think about things I didn’t like. I had stuff to do today, which may be what made me feel better today. Maybe I shouldn’t spoil this mood. Ah, well, it’ll be spoiled soon enough when I go home and have to deal with Catherine and then with seeing my dad, so I might as well dive into my childhood again.
My childhood friend Nancy was over all the time. We always played Barbies or house or something, and I was never over there, although I wanted to get away from my family. She had a way of convincing me it was best for her to come over. But that put me in control of the friendship, in a way, because they were my toys, it was my house, she was only a guest (even though she almost lived here). I think I used that advantage to exert some sort of power over her, to make myself feel superior to her at times. I was smarter than her, even though I was a year younger than her. I wonder if I treated her second-hand. It’s hard for me to tell, because I wasn’t objective. Besides, it was so long ago. But if I was, I might have been because I wanted to feel strong, that I had power over something. It was hard to feel as if I had any power over anything in my house when I was little. Intelligence was all I had, I guess. But then again, in my house everyone was older than me and smarter than me anyway, my parents had been through all of this child-rearing stuff, this was just another kid, nothing new.
Actually, it was a little worse than that. I wasn’t just another kid, I was the last kid, which meant that as soon as they were able to get rid of me they could start living their life. I don’t think they wanted to make me feel unloved, but that’s exactly what they made me feel. Tired. They were tired of raising children, so they just wanted to kind of dump me off on someone. Is it their fault that they were tired? I guess not... Was it their fault they wanted to live their life? I guess not... Should they have aborted me? I don’t think so, well, at least not for my sake... But when I’m at the receiving end of all this hidden hostility I want something or someone to blame other than circumstance. You can’t yell at circumstance, or punch it in the face, or wish it dead.
When I was little mom and dad would go on vacation and I would be left with these house sitters. Mary was the woman’s name, I think John was the guy, oh, I could be way off, I don’t remember that much when I was that little. I don’t even remember how old I could have been. But they would house sit for as long as two weeks, I think, watch me, the house, while mom and dad went on vacation. I don’t know where my sister was.
And Grandma would stay when my sister was a little older and they just needed someone to watch me.
My parents would have people over, cocktail parties, I suppose, couples would be over, and they really didn’t want me around then. Who would want a little kid around while they’re entertaining guests anyway? Whenever I was in front of guests I would be very respectful and polite, and they would think I was a perfect kid. My parents would either agree (the only times I got compliments or even acknowledgments from them) or make a joke, like “Oh, she’s a terror. Next time she leaves the house we’re changing the locks on the doors.” They were charming all right.
Sure, it was a joke, but that’s the only kind of stuff I got from them, and after a while, even comments like that will hurt. A lot.
When I went to school, I acted the way I did at home. I wanted to learn, I was intelligent, and I respected my teachers. Which made all the other kids hate me, of course, and that didn’t make things any easier. Ellen’s friends didn’t like me because I was a geek who was 2 years younger than them. They treated me like shit. The kids at the bus stop would push me around every day - I mean literally push me around, they’d throw rocks at me, they’d shove me until I fell and had cuts and scrapes. And I was always told not to fight back, they’ll keep fighting if you fight them back, just ignore them. It’s hard to ignore them when you’re picking yourself up off the ground and they’re pushing you back down again. And then I’d go home crying, cut, bleeding, and my mother would do nothing. I don’t even think my father ever even knew about any of it. My sister was the only one that got mad, and every once in a while she’d call the parents of the person that did it and make them apologize, or walk with me to the bus stop if she could. How fucking humiliating. And I always hated the fact that my mom didn’t even seem angry, or concerned. Hey, mom, someone is beating up your daughter for no good reason. Aren’t you mad? Don’t you feel anything? Don’t you feel anything for me?
Why didn’t I ever fight them? I wish I did. There were so many things I could have done without even laying a hand on them that could have gotten them back. But I never did anything. I was told never to talk back, never to hurt people. I never talked back to my family, If I did I would have gotten hit, or screamed at, and nothing would have been better, and it all would have been worse. I was too afraid to do something to those other kids, I didn’t know what it would be like, I didn’t know what would have happened if I did.
If my family was civil to me, it would be through making fun of me. It was their way of being loving, I suppose, but when you never feel any love, being made fun of is pretty damn degrading.
Adultism is what they call it, treating children like they’re shit because they’re not as old as you and they don’t have your experiences and they’re not as knowledgeable. That’s why I try to treat children more like adult, and I don’t use child voices with them and I don’t give them ultimatums and I don’t threaten them and I don’t cut down their ideas. I listen to them, even if their ideas are obnoxious, hell, at least they’re original ideas, I mean, they are THEIR ideas. Making a fort in my closet as a stupid thing, but if anyone in the world respected it they instantly earned my respect. It helps when people don’t treat you like an idiot.
When children ask me questions, and I do my best to answer them. They deserve that.
Well, it’s getting close to time for me to go. I’m sure I’ll continue this soon. This is so emotional for me. It’s strange to think of all these things, to make myself think about them in detail. I usually try not to think about them. My stomach feels tense. I’ll write soon-
11-16-82 9:40 p.m.
Hi. Here I am, this time at the computer at home. It makes a lot less noise than the keyboard at work. A quality computer, I have. I think this writing about my past is starting to prove to be very interesting. I didn’t even think I really had any resentment toward my mother, but some seemed to come out in one of the writings.
Not surprising, I guess, considering the fact that she left us.
Saw dad today. Took me and my sister out to dinner. He bitched to m about things that were out of my control. Not surprising.
Nothing is good enough for my father.
I remember when I was inducted into National Honors Society in high school. There was going to be a huge ceremony, lighting candles, the whole deal. My dad was out and said he couldn’t go. I drove the wagon to school by myself.
I just wanted someone in my house to give a crap about what I did. I didn’t want to push them to go, because that wasn’t proper for me to do. But going to things like that alone made me feel horrid. Like no one noticed I was doing anything good. I didn’t even have to be there. It wouldn’t have made a difference.
Well, the ceremony was going on, and I walked off the stage with my candle and I had to go to the back of the gym, through the audience, to make a ring of people around the gym, it was part of the ceremony. And I’m walking down the aisle, and in the back is my dad, he came in the middle of the ceremony. Then he left before it was over. It was nice, I suppose, because dad was there, even though he never went to any functions of mine, it it was also strange, like it was forced. It wasn’t right that he was there. I didn’t know what to say to him.
As if I ever know what to say to him.
I was in the plays my senior year. It was pretty mandatory that my family go to opening night. They went, and afterward all I heard was dad complain that it was too quiet, that he couldn’t hear. Get a hearing aid, you stupid man. Sorry, but why is he trying to bring me down by complaining about it to me right after the performance? That’s when you feel the best, you probably want to cry with joy, and he’s telling me he couldn’t hear, and he wasn’t even in the back of the auditorium.
I don’t know. It’s just that after a while they made the appointments that they were supposed to make as family, but it still wasn’t good. They were at graduation, but it was nicer to see Nancy there, or my boss at the Plush Horse, who came to see me and a co-worker graduate.
I went to a retreat weekend once, and Sunday there was a family day. We got back to the school after being away for the weekend talking about things, and our parents were supposed to be there so that we could talk to them about what we discussed. The whole point of this retreat became “how to make it better for kids to grow up, and how to like your parents, and how to like yourself...” It was a really positive experience. I liked it a lot. But mom and dad weren’t there, of course, so I was adopted by a friend’s parents for the day. They liked the program so much that they helped run it the next year. My parents knew nothing about it.
It was that weekend, my junior year in high school, that I finally said something about my family, the first time ever. We’d have a lecture about a topic, and then we’d have a small group of about 10 people that would discuss our reactions to it, our feelings. Whenever we’d get on something about our parents, I’d clam up. Finally one of the guys who was running our small group made me talk. I don’t know what he said, but when I started talking, I lost it. I was crying and crying, and trying to spit out stuff about my family, and everyone there was very supportive. Lots of hugs. It was over all a good thing. People asked me to read poetry, and sing, and people were complimenting me on my talents, and people were telling me I was a good person. It was such a high. I never thought I could feel so good about myself, I never thought I could have such good friends.
Well, yeah, I lost those friends. And for the most part I lost those feelings. But it was nice to have those feelings, even if they were just for a little while. I went back after this weekend of revelations and no one from my family was even there. It was like everything was instantly the same, even though this whole weekend stressed change.
I guess I was depressed before I went to on that weekend, but after the weekend I knew why I was depressed. And that didn’t make anything better.
I’ll talk about more tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
11-17-82
I hate being the baby. I’m always the one who is considered last, I am always the one who’s opinions are discounted. I am always the one who suffers on behalf of everyone else. The last time I checked I as an adult. I’m tired of it.
I was always the last for everything. Dad used to visit my brother at college, the way that normal parents visit their children, spend time with them. If my parents came to help me move I was surprised. They didn’t do that for a year. They didn’t even see my last apartment until I was moving out, and they never even saw my first apartment. Wait. Dad never saw where I lived period. It was too much of a hassle for him to drive to see me.
Damnit, I hate this family, I just want to get away from it so much.
Half of it already left me, and I still feel this way.
Every year I visit them for Christmas. And every time I have gone there until about two years ago dad would get so mad at me that things were miserable. I was 17 and he grounded me for the length of my visit. Things are just miserable when I’m there.
And my sister has always been the agitator.
When I was little, I used to look up to her. She was all I had, mom and dad never wanted to spend any time with me. She became my mother. When I was arguing with Connie, my girlfriend, she would be the one who came in and tried to settle things. Granted, it was only because mom didn’t want to deal with me, but at least someone was there.
But she’d always find so much fault with me. Am I really that bad? She’d always tell me to do things. Was she my mother? Put your socks away. Help around the house. We shouldn’t have to tell you to do things, you should know what should be done and just do them. And when I did something wrong, I’d get hell for it.
It would go like this: She would get mad at me because she found a pair of socks in the front room. She’d ignore me all day, and during the day I wouldn’t have the courage to confront her about it. By night I knew that if I didn’t resolve this that day it would just be ten times worse by the next day. So as I finished getting ready for bed, I knocked on her door. She would be laying or sitting in her bed, wide awake, just waiting for me to come in and apologize. And I’d cry and cry because I had to stand there in the dark for two or three hours while she told me about how wrong I was and what a bad person I was and how I should learn to be better. And I’d have to apologize, and I never wanted to, and I never meant it, but I had to do it to shut her up and I had to make it sound convincing or she’d go into an argument about how I had to make my apology sound genuine. And she’d still be going on even after I apologized, after I promised I’d be better, that I wouldn’t do anything like that again.
I hate her for doing that to me. She’s such a fucking bitch. I hate her for the way she made me feel. She did this to me almost two times a week. For I don’t know how many years. I’d be standing there in her room in total darkness, I’d be wavering as I was standing because I was so tired. It’d be one-thirty in the morning, I’d be sniffing every 5 seconds because I had been crying for the past three hours, and I didn’t learn anything. I don’t even think there was anything to learn. Looking back, all the things she argued about with me were silly, stupid little things, and she degraded me so much by doing that to me all the time. Talk about making a person feel worthless. Do that to a person from when they’re 5 to when they’re 17, and they’re going to be messed up.
And I hate her for it, because even if they were valid points she made, she has no right to cut my life because she has no life of her own. She’s unemployed, friendless, boyfriendless, she still lives at home, she’s fat, bitchy and anal retentive.How can a person take advice from that? How can a person listen to that yell at you?
She still does it, every day, while I visit. She tries to make me feel bad for everything I do. When I’m there she’s making me feel like I always have to hide.
When I was 17, it was the summer before I left for college, I was driving mom and my sister home from a restaurant once because they had too many margaritas. So I’m driving toward the driveway and we’re approaching the garbage cans. They were empty; garbage was picked up that morning. I noticed that they had to be picked up (normally, my sister would yell at me because I didn’t notice that they had to be put away). So I saw them, and since we were at the end of the driveway, I thought that this would be the best time to get the garbage cans. Since I was driving, I said something to the effect of, “Should we pick up the garbage cans since we’re at the end of the driveway?” And my sister thought it was extremely rude that I assumed someone else should pick them up (well, I was driving, it was kind of pointless for me to get out and do it, unless someone wanted to drive the rest of the driveway, and in that case it would have been easier to just walk from the stupid house and get the garbage cans anyway). So she stormed out of the car, because mom shouldn’t have to do it, of course, and she got into the house and she stormed upstairs. She wanted to watch a movie that evening but wouldn’t even come downstairs because she was so mad at me. I told mom what she was doing, probably the first time I ever told mom that she did this kind of stuff to me. Mom said to just let her sulk, not to go up there to talk to her. So... I didn’t. And for 3 or 4 days my sister ignored me. It was almost nice, I didn’t have to deal with her. Then one night I wake up in the middle of the night, sensing that someone was in my room. I put my hand on my pillow to get up, and there’s a paper on my pillow. I turn on the light, and my sister had left a note for me. It said something like, “Fine - if you don’t want to be my sister, fine - I’ll never do anything nice for you, I’ll never buy you presents, I’ll never talk to you again. Don’t ever ask for everything from me!!!”
At this point I just thought all of this was so stupid, so I went over and told her - rationally - that she was being childish and stupid. It’s insane to make such a big deal about bringing in garbage cans. And she tried to argue with me, and she cried and cried and cried, and she said she might as well kill herself, and she’s always wrong (that one was said sarcastically, of course), and I just kept saying, you’re being childish, and no one can have a rational conversation with you when you’re saying such childish things. It was 5 in the morning and I was winning. It was the first time I ever did anything like that.
After that, from then until now, she’s been different. Much more pathetic. She still argues with me, she still complains to me, but now she couples it all with, “you’re my best friend, I want to be friends with you,” and she’s sobbing and sobbing, and she’s acting like a fucking idiot. I suppose I should pity her, but she brings everything upon herself. She doesn’t have a job - not because the market is so tough (It is, but not that tough), but because after all these years she’s still unwilling to move out of her parent’s house and look for a job outside of a ten mile radius of her little safe suburb. She doesn’t try anything new. She got a part-time job at the local department store one year because a friend of hers filled out an application. My sister was so mad when her friend backed out of working. She couldn’t even take a jewelry making class this year unless she made someone else take it with her. She won’t drive downtown to visit her few friends (I personally think they just put up with her because they pity her, because they all have lives and new friends of their own, and she is just this remnant friend who has failed in life) because she doesn’t know where to park and someone is bound to hit her car and she could get lost, and worse yet, she could drive into a bad neighborhood, she could get killed if she took the wrong turn, you know, or someone could mug her, or steal her car. And even if she did get there and she did have fun she’d have to drive home, and that’s such a long drive that she’d lose sleep and feel miserable the next day.
She spends her time obsessing over her nails, spending insane amounts of money on jewelry. She makes jewelry, but now she’s got stacks of jewelry she wants to sell but never will. And she’s got yards of fabric for dresses and shirts and all sorts of clothing, but she never has the time to make anything because she’s so busy. Busy? She’s got nothing to do, how can she be busy?
Expecting the Barbarians
J. Quinn Brisben
Stavros could see the two young men across the street standing under the street light by the parking lot. They were elaborately combing their hair and talking softly to each other. They were alert, watchful, obviously with some serious purpose in mind. Any competent cop could have spotted them immediately, asked them what they were doing in that neighborhood so late at night, accepted their explanation genially, then stayed until they moved on.
A squad car would be by in five or ten minutes. This was a prosperous arterial shopping street, two blocks from a major intersection. One block to the east, across the street from the bank, Kostakis kept his lunch room open all night. Cops liked to stop there for a cup of coffee. They liked to stop at Stavros’ restaurant, too, but he had closed as usual at midnight. He had been less than a year in this neighborhood, but he knew most of the cops in the district and could greet them without having to squint at their name tags.
In five or ten minutes a squad car would come by, probably from the west. Stavros would see it, get outside quickly and lock the door to his restaurant, which was already dark except for the light over the cash register, go down the street with the canvas bag full of the night’s receipts, drop it in the night depository at the bank, then get into his car around the corner and drive home before there was any trouble. Even if the squad did not stop it would effectively neutralize the young men.
He felt the grip of the gun which he kept under the cash register. He had no faith in it. Last month Kim, who owned the Korean place one block west, had been jumped in his own parking lot. He had a good safe in his place and went to the bank in the day time, so he had no money on him. But he did have a gun. The muggers took it away from him and almost beat him to death with it. A week later the hoodlums had been caught shortly after they had used the gun to kill a liquor store owner over on Clark. Kim told Stavros that he felt deeply dishonored by that and would never carry a gun again. A gun is no good in the hands of a civilized person against fast-handed barbarians who do not care whether they live or die.
It was a hot night in late September. Stavros had turned off the air conditioning when the last customer had left and helped everyone clean the place up and get ready for the next day. He had unaccountably felt like being alone for a while and had sent his employees home a little early. He had stacked the chairs on the tables and swept the place out himself. He remembered the knowing, sad look Gus had given him that night as he went out the door.
Gus was his oldest waiter, a shuffling man with bristling grey hair who drank far too much and who had once owned his own restaurant. Gus could see that there was never a line of people waiting to be seated, that half the tables were empty even at the busiest time of the evening. There was money in the till every night, but it was not enough to meet all the expenses. It would depend on Stavros’ agility in fending off creditors and other suppliers how long he could hang on, but the place was inevitably going broke.
The location was not bad, although the place had no parking lot and customers had to use the commercial lot across the street. There were a dozen restaurants along the four blocks of the street that were the commercial heart of the neighborhood, and most of them made money. It was a popular area for young people to come in the evening, and the many offices in the area assured a big lunch business as well. Stavros had no liquor license, but patrons were allowed to bring their own bottle, and a healthy symbiotic relationship had developed with the liquor store next door.
The trouble was that Stavros had a place that was in no way distinctive. He did not stay open all night and attract a big breakfast trade like Kostakis across from the bank. He had no bar. He did not offer belly dancers or other ethnic entertainment like three of the other neighborhood places. His menu was long, with a full range or Greek and American specialties, but there was nothing on it that was really out of the ordinary. He had been told many times that he should specialize, specialize in gyros of big Greek salads, even specialize in cheeseburgers with olives on them, anything that would make his place stand out in the area.
The long menu meant extra supplies, waste in the kitchen, delays in service. It was the same menu that Stavros had had in the old place on Halsted, the same menu that he had kept for twenty-five years, one that was difficult to maintain with today’s high labor costs.
The decor was wrong, too. There were the same blown-up photographs of Greek tourist sites in half the other places in the area, the same crossed Greek and American flags, nothing to distinguish it form any other moderately priced Greek restaurant. Stavros did not even have a faded photograph of his native village, as most of the other proprietors had. His native village had been a street of dumbbell tenements on the near west side of Chicago which had been bulldozed below the depths of the lowest foundations to make an expressway when he was fifteen years old. Stavros did not know if anyone had preserved pictures of that street; certainly he had not.
Most of all, Stavros knew, the trouble was in himself. Old Lianos in the next block had a place even more ordinary and faded than his, yet it was always crowded. Lianos hugged every customer who came in, regardless of age or sex, remembered the names of hundreds of them, overlaid his walls with autographed pictures of minor celebrities who had had a wonderful time there, did a huge wedding and anniversary trade. Stavros was not like this. He was a small man with a nondescript moustache who preferred to stand quietly behind the cash register or move quickly and anonymously among the tables and through the back door to see that the cooks and dish washers were on the job.
The whole restaurant had taken on his air of anonymity. The best customers were the cops. Stavros gave them free cups of his competently made but not outstanding coffee, but so did every restaurant in the neighborhood, and they did not come for that. They went to Kostakis or Lianos for free food. They came to Stavros for anonymity.
Several times a night, one or sometimes two cops would come in with someone else and go immediately to one of the booths in the back which could not be seen from the street. Sometimes the cops would leave before the someone else, and the someone else would ask to leave by way of the kitchen. These were stoolies, of course, small-time burglars and muggers, pimps and dope dealers, whores and shoplifters.
On these occasions the cops insisted on paying for meals both for the stoolies and for themselves. The cops had a special fund for that. Sometimes a bottle of wine or hard liquor was included in the deal, even some cash. Stavros supposed that dope was sometimes part of the deal, too, but he never saw any change hands. He would have been shocked if he had. The cops knew he had a respectable trade. There were rules for the use of premises such as his which were well understood even if they were never written down.
The cops used Stavros’ place and made sure he was never bothered by little things like hassles over the status of immigrant dish washers and waiters. They protected him from bad drunks, although they were not nearly so many here as in the old place on Halsted. That was near Skid Row, or what was left of it now that the big office buildings were spreading west of the river. Many of the bad drunks were crazy or so drunk that they were long past caring, and they would wander into Stavros’ place for its warmth and chairs. A wave at a passing squad or a call to the district station would get them removed quickly and discreetly.
Stavros was glad that there were fewer drunks this far north. They disgusted him; he did not understand how they could let themselves go like that. He was a fastidious man himself, not only because his business demanded a high standard of cleanliness and order but also because it pleased him to be that way.
The young men were still standing under the light, smoking cigarettes and calmly surveying the scene. Their jeans were skin-tight, but they were carrying jackets which possibly concealed guns.
On Halsted the drunks had been an irritation but not a real threat. He had not really wanted to move from there, had been forced to do so in fact. Business had been declining there for years, even before old Pappas, his father-in-law, died. Most of the residential neighborhood, which had provided the main support for the place, had been torn up by the building of the expressway and the big university campus. Only the row of restaurants along Halsted was left. Most of the patrons were not Greeks anymore. Pappas, though, had retained the loyalty of a lot of old-timers. Some of them would drive in twenty miles or more from the suburbs to drink coffee with Pappas and discuss the events of the day. Pappas was the kind of man whose judgement they respected.
One by one the old timers died off. Their sons and grandsons did not replace them. Then Pappas died. Stavros was advised to move the place then. Pappas had two sons. One of them was a lawyer with a lit of political connections. The other was buying McDonalds franchises back in the 1950’s and had become very rich. Both of them were nearly a generation older than Stavros. They told him that the old neighborhood was dead, that he had better move north and west where a lot of the old restaurants were relocating. Stavros had ignored them.
He had hung on for another five years. The Agnopoulos brothers had a popular place next door to his and wanted to expand. They offered Stavros a lot of money to vacate his lease on the old building. Stavros refused. The next day a Rolls Royce drove up and parked by a fire plug in front of the little restaurant. No cop in his right mind would ticket such a car. It was the most famous car in the Chicago Greek community. It belonged to Papadapoulos.
Papadapoulos ran all the gambling in the community and in quite a few other communities as well. He was a big in the Outfit as you could get without being an Italian. The ward committeeman, who represented the Outfit in all their dealings with local government, was his special friend. Stavros bought all his insurance from this ward committeeman and had all his table cloths and napkins washed by the ward committeeman’s laundry because people who did not make these arrangements got into more trouble than it was worth. This had been true in the neighborhood since before Stavros had been born.
Papadapoulos was delighted to see his old friend Stavros again. He recalled the many pleasant times he had had in this places when old Pappas had been alive, a grand old man, a credit to the community, one who understood that Greeks had to stand together. He inquired after the health of Stavros’ beautiful wife Helena, reminding him that he, Papadapoulos, had been a guest at their wedding. He also inquired after the health of their two lovely daughters, perhaps, how time flies, soon to be brides themselves. How sad that we must grow old and the world change, but that was the way things were. Meanwhile the young men who had come in with Papadapoulos were sitting impassively, looking at the plate-glass window in the front of the restaurant and at other fragile things.
Stavros understood. He had understood that day in the 1950’s when a less polite man had told his mother that they must move out of the apartment on Union that was the only home he could remember. There was no way that a person could hold out against power like that. The longer you tried to resist the more it cost you. Soon he vacated the lease for twenty percent less than the Agnopoulos brothers originally offered him. The brothers made no profit on this. The twenty percent went to a lawyer who was a friend of Stavros’ brother-in-law, to Papadapoulos, and to the ward committeeman. Compared to predators like those, the two young men under the street light were a minor threat indeed.
None of the remaining old-timers had followed Stavros to the new place. Now, besides the cops and their associates, his trade consisted of transients and, on weekends, the overflow from the more popular restaurants on the street. There were also a few regulars, loners mostly.
One was a man in a shabby suit and frayed necktie who looked vaguely academic. He was maybe forty-five, the same age as Stavros. Every day he came in at precisely six o’clock with a bottle of the cheapest retsina from the liquor store and a book, usually one dealing with European history. It was seldom the same book two days in a row. He would prop the book in front of him, open the wine himself with a corkscrew on a Boy Scout knife, then order a small salad, a cup of egg lemon soup, and lamb with rice, never varying his order in the slightest way. He would read and eat in an abstracted fashion, frequently spilling food on his shirt. When he had finished with the lamb, he would continue to refill his glass until the bottle was empty, then order a piece of baklava and a cup of coffee. After that was consumed he would go, always leaving a tip of exactly ten percent of the bill.
Once he tried to engage Stavros in conversation. He was reading a biography of the twentieth century Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk, and he asked Stavros something about the expulsion of the Greeks from Asia Minor in the early 1920’s. Stavros knew a good deal about it, for his mother had told him many stories of her perilous odyssey as a girl from Smyrna to Chicago. However, he did not want to talk about it with his customer. The man was not a Greek. All he knew about it was what he learned from books. Stavros had a strong dislike for people who knew Greek things only from books.
A long time ago he had been a great reader himself. He was always the best student in his class in the Orthodox parochial school, winning scholarships so that his mother never had to pay tuition. He had gone to a respectable all-boys technical high school and had won a good scholarship to the University of Wisconsin. In so far as he had an ambition, he had wanted to be an engineer, a builder of roads and bridges. He liked the clean flow of interstate highways which were being built then. He liked the bronzed and muscular crews who worked on them in the summertime. They reminded him of workers in vineyards and olive groves in a land that he had never seen. He was glad that nothing less than the clean lines and mathematical coherence of the new roads had replaced the heart of the old neighborhood.
It took him more than two years in Madison to realize the mistake that he had made. He liked most of his classes there and did well in them, although he did have a hard time with a graduate student who graded the compositions in his required freshman english class. Stavros wrote grammatically and clearly on all the topics on which he was asked to write, but he found it difficult to care about the writings he was asked to analyze and criticize. The graduate student complained repeatedly that Stavros’ writing lacked feeling and imagination.
Finally, told to describe a vivid memory, he wrote about the block on which he had grown up, the smells of the little grocery stores and restaurants, the social clubs and the bars, the incense in the dark old church, home of the booming bass voice of Father Chrysotomos. The graduate student read that one aloud to the small section of the huge class that was his personal charge. Knowing that he had cinched a grade in English which would not greatly lower his overall high average in he important subjects, Stavros relaxed and talked in class about his background.
One of the students who heard him do this was Shirley. She was part of a group who were doing an off-campus production of “Medea.” She took Stavros to a rehearsal, and the director decided to scrap all their work so far and rethink the play with the help of an authentic Greek. Stavros did not really know classic Greek, but he had studied the classics in school and could translate the sounds of the original and puzzle out the meaning fairly well. The theater group thought his talents were wonderful.
Shirley, especially, thought he was wonderful. She came from a small town in northern Wisconsin and was in full revolt against the restrictions of her upbringing. Still, there were limits as to how brave a revolt a young woman could make in 1959, even near the Madison campus. A black lover was impossible except for the very daring, a Jewish lover was a bit of a cliche. A shy and previously virginal Greek-American engineering student had just the right touch of exoticism.
When the next school year began they were living on the third floor of an old house near the campus. Shirley had redecorated the place with dark green wallpaper and furnished it mostly with stuffed pillows. Stavros, an only child who had spent a lot of his time with his mother in the kitchen, rather enjoyed doing most of the cooking. There were lots of parties with jugs of cheap wine where everybody brought guitars and sang folk songs. Stavros met a couple of real communists, black people from both Africa and America, and people who did not believe smoking marijuana should be a crime. The scholarship which Stavros had did not cover nearly half of their expanses, but Shirley had a generous allowance from her disapproving family.
In the summers Stavros went back to Chicago to work for a fruit wholesaler in the Haymarket, just as he had done when he was in high school. On the August day that John Kennedy won the presidential nomination Stavros’ mother died without warning of a heart attack. She had worked in Lambrakis’ bakery as usual on that last day. Stavros had no clear memories of his father, who had spent many years in a tuberculosis sanatarium before he had died.
Stavros’ mother’s funeral, held in Father Chrysotomos’ new church several miles from the heart of the old community, was well-attended. Stavros received many offers of financial aid from his mother’s old friends, which he politely refused. He put his mother’s keepsakes and most precious household goods in a trunk which he stored in a warehouse. Before he went back to Wisconsin in September, he cleared out the small apartment where he and his mother had been living. The neighborhood was filling up with Mexicans, and this place had none of the childhood associations of the building in which he had grown up and had been reduced to rubble years before to make a highway.
With Shirley back in Madison, he began to have bad dreams. He was locked inside a trunk and could not get out. He was reading a page of Euripides which would suddenly go blank. He was running up a blind alley in Constantinople with the Turkish cavalry thundering after him. He was trying to stop bulldozers from effacing the last vestiges of the ruins of Troy. The diagrams and mathematical symbols in his textbooks began to seem meaningless. He was uncomfortable in the dark green walled apartment, yet he was afraid to leave it.
Shirley insisted that he see a friend of her who was majoring in psychology. When the friend heard that Stavros’ mother had recently died, he started talking a lot about Oedipus. Stavros had no faith in the man because he had obviously never read the play. Even Shirley began to seem a stranger to him, some Medea-like outlander who would bring disaster on him. She had never had the slightest interest in his engineering studies, and he did not really share her interest in literature or unorthodox lifestyles. This world with its confusion of tongues and its constantly changing rules would never be his world.
Shirley was active in the Kennedy campaign and in October went to a strategy meeting in Milwaukee. Stavros went with her. Shirley suggested that he see the sights while she was conferring. She had heard that there was a new Greek Orthodox church in town designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Stavros found the old Greek Orthodox church and an old priest and poured out his heart to him. The old priest said that Stavros should go home. Stavros was not sure that he had any home to go to. He was advised to seek out his parish priest.
After driving back to Madison, he packed his few personal belongings and caught a bus to Chicago. Shirley thought that it was a bad thing that he was giving up his scholarship, and she still liked him a lot, but she was not really sorry to see him go. She was not equipped to deal with him or his troubles, and she thought she was beginning to outgrow the relationship anyway.
Father Chrysotomos welcomed him like a son and seemed to understand his problems perfectly. The priest had grown children, and there was a spare room where Stavros was welcome to stay as long as he liked. If a person of his education did not mind taking a menial job, Pappas down at the old Smyrna Restaurant on Halsted, a countryman of his late blessed mother, this Pappas needed a waiter, and such a job would keep body and soul together until something better came along.
Pappas liked Stavros from the first. He was absolutely honest and could be trusted to watch the cash register and the other waiters while Pappas discussed the affairs of the world with his many old friends. He had a good eye for meat and fresh vegetables and was an unassertive but shrewd bargainer. Lambrakis remembered his mother fondly and made sure that he got the best of the day’s pastries. Within a few months he was managing the restaurant, a situation which suited old Pappas very well.
Pappas had married twice, the second time when he was nearly fifty. His second bride had been a girl in the teens from the old country. Thus his daughter Helena was nineteen when he was nearly seventy. She had been raised by her mother to accept the old ways and had never questioned them. Pappas thought that it was about time that she got married, just as he thought that it was about time that a younger person took over the more time-consuming chores at the restaurant. Stavros was ideally suited to both purposes. He had no money of course, but he was hard-working, intelligent, polite, and not bad looking at all. Besides, his mother had come from the same town as Pappas, and Pappas believed it was his duty to help such a person.
Stavros could not remember proposing to Helena. He was invited to dinner at the home of Pappas, took Helena to several church socials and to the movies, and after a while it was settled. Helena was no great beauty, but she was good-natured and pleasant to be with. Helena, her mother, and Stavros had all mastered the art of getting along with Pappas, which was to be quietly competent and to let him think he was having his own way in everything. Stavros had no objection to joining such a family and much preferred to marrying Helena and running a restaurant on Halsted to being an engineer in an alien world.
A squad car came slowly up the street from the west. The two young men began strolling east toward their own neighborhood, elaborately paying the squad no attention. Stavros had the day’s receipts in a canvas bag and could have easily made it to the depository and to his car under the unobtrusive police protection. He could have hailed the squad, since most of the police knew him by sight, and they would have detained the men until he was safe. He did not do so. He watched the squad until it was out of sight, then watched the young men walk slowly back to their post under the street light. He could not explain to himself why he had not moved, but he certainly had no intention of doing so just yet.
“Those people were a kind of solution,” he said, then wondered how that phrase had come into his head. It was from some kind of poem, a modern poem, a poem he had not liked. Of course. He had heard it the Sunday afternoon that the Parnassos Society had invited that damned barbarian Peter Isgren to lecture on modern Greek poetry.
The Parnassos Society was one of several Greek cultural organizations of which Stavros was a nominal member. It met once a month in a public room of a small but elegant hotel on the near North Side. Stavros did not ordinarily attend such meetings, for they were quite frankly just a pretext for the young people of the community to get together. He had been especially invited to attend this meeting by his older daughter Anna. He ought to have known that something was up.
He loved Anna dearly, but she had always been troublesome. In the big house on the Northwest Side where he had lived with his wife’s parents, and still lived as the head of the household now that old Pappas was dead, Anna had always been a disruption. Everyone else, his wife, his mother-in-law, who barely spoke english, his younger daughter Maria, himself, had always submitted to the loud rule of the old man, doing what he wanted to, when he wanted to do it. Anna never submitted.
Even when she was five years old she would argue with her grandfather over which television program to watch, arguments which sometimes led to tears and slammed doors on her part but which usually led her to total victory. That Christmas old Pappas gave her a huge television for the play room, one over which she had total control, for she was his darling. This pattern of noisy confrontation followed by lavish gifts continued for the rest of the old man’s life. He died when Anna was fourteen; she was inconsolable for weeks.
Anna had already made it clear that she would take her Greek heritage on her own terms or not at all. When she was twelve she had insisted on being withdrawn from the Orthodox parochial school. When Stavros refused she defied her teachers in such ingenious ways that she was expelled. Stavros was anguished but Father Chrysotomos reassured him.
“The teacher she hated was a bully and a tyrant, totally unworthy of that great profession,” he said. “The school pays so poorly that the principal dare not dismiss even such a wretch. I think Anna showed a fine spirit in defying her and will be better off in a school where teachers are not allowed to be so arbitrary. Anna wants justice, a rare thing in this world but worth struggling for, She is a regular Antigone, that one.”
When she was sixteen, she refused to obey Stavros’ restrictions concerning dating and late hours. He stopped her allowance. She promptly got a job in a restaurant near her high school. He reminded her that she was living in his house. She told him that by the terms of her grandfather’s will it was her grandmother’s house and she would submit to eviction from no one else. He said in despair that he was her legal guardian and that he must turn her over to the juvenile authorities if she continued to disobey him. She told him to do that if he dared but that she would under no circumstances be the last teenager in Chicago to be restricted by silly rules which were inappropriate in the 1980’s.
Stavros listened a long while while Father Chrysotomos again praised Anna’s high spirits before he knew that he must retreat. Anna allowed him to do so with some dignity. Even after things had calmed down, though, she continued to work as a waitress and was reluctant to take any money from her father. Despite her independence of spirit she was as good a student as her father had been, with tastes running strongly to the natural sciences. She won scholarships which enabled her to attend the local branch of the University of Illinois, whose campus covered a large portion of what had been the neighborhood where her father grew up. She wanted to be an obstetrician.
On her twentieth birthday she left the house and moved into a small apartment near the campus. She had a roommate. She did not specify the sex of the roommate. Stavros was afraid to ask. She had a small allowance from her grandmother, who was slowly awakening to the independent possibilities of widowhood.
Two months later Anna called him to make sure that he attended the next meeting of the Parnassos Society. The speaker, Peter Isgren, was a young man with long blonde hair and a scraggly beard. He was wearing a suit jacket and a necktie, but he was also wearing faded and patched blue jeans and sneakers.
He began his speech by explaining how he had come to be attracted to Greek poetry of this century. He was of Swedish ancestry and had grown up in Mitchell, South Dakota. When he was in high school he had a job in a lumber yard. The lumber yard was managed by a man named Charalambides who read Greek and who had many books. As the young man explained it, there was not much else to do in Mitchell besides watch the annual change of decorations on their convention hall, the famous Corn Palace, so he had begun to read and speak Greek under the tutelage of his boss. He had done so in the same spirit that another youth might have built hot rods or collected Indian arrowheads.
He had moved on to classic Greek and to Russian and other Slavic languages, but modern Greek had remained his first love. He was now completing a master’s essay on C. P. Cavafy, whom he considered the greatest modern Greek poet. He spent a pleasant hour quoting Cavafy, Kazantzakis, and other modern masters, showing the creative tension which had come from the ambiguity of being placed in a culture that was marginal to and at the same time the deepest root of western civilization. He analyzed extensively the witty and beautiful poem of Cavafy in which the people of Byzantium have their cultural fatigue intensified by the coming of the barbarians, then are frustrated when the barbarians fail to come.
After the lecture Anna introduced him to Peter Isgren. He could tell by the way people fell back when he and Anna approached the man that this whole afternoon had been planned for his benefit. Peter was cordial and flattering, but Stavros was abrupt and cold with him. Later, Anna confirmed his suspicion that she was living with this young man and planned to marry him.
Stavros told her that this was impossible, that the young man had perhaps learned some Greek from books, but he was not a Greek. Anna recited a list of young women of their acquaintance who married non-Greeks. Stavros said all of this had no relevance to his family, which had always been proud to be Greek and would remain so. Anna said that she would marry whom she wished. Stavros said that he had no power to stop her, but that he would not give his blessing and would not attend the wedding.
Father Chrysotomos performed the ceremony, his fee paid by Anna’s grandmother. The affair was simple, as befitted the resources of young people who lived on scholarships and part-time wages at menial jobs. Anna’s mother attended, but her father and younger sister remained at home. He relented enough only to send some baklava to the site of the reception. Anna refused to come to the house without her husband, and Stavros had not seen her since. His wife and daughter were loyal, but life at home had become flat and tasteless.
Now the restaurant was definitely failing, and Stavros would be able to keep it open only for a few more months. His brothers-in-law might help him, but they would do so contemptuously. At the moment he could think of no fate more humiliating than to be an old waiter like Gus or to manage a McDonald’s as an employee of his brother-in-law. His wife and younger daughter would be just as well off living on the vast amount of insurance that the ward committeeman made him buy.
He was sure there would not a squad car coming by for another five minutes. The two young men were waiting across the street. He slipped the gun into his jacket pocket, grasped the canvas bag full of money, and went out the front door, locking it after him. He walked down the street slowly. The young men walked parallel to him across the street.
Perhaps I will shoot one of them before they get me, he thought. Perhaps my death will force the police to give more protection to the merchants in this area.
The young men were staring hard at him. He could hear their footsteps across the empty street. Then there was a pause. The young men had stopped and were conferring with each other. Stavros walked at a steady pace. He was sure they would rush across the street to attack him any second now. His hand slipped into his jacket pocket. He was less than a hundred feet from the bank depository. There was no sound from across the street for almost a minute.
He unlocked the bank depository and put his money in. He could see the young men going into Kostakis’ all-night place across the street. Perhaps they had seen something that he had not seen. Perhaps they had just changed their minds.
Stavros would have to think of something else.
The Pope and The President
Ed Hamilton
When I was a baby I had blonde hair and blue eyes, and cute little fat cheeks-just like lots of babies.
Also, just like a lot of babies, people were always picking me up-just snatching me up from the floor (where I was minding my own business)-and hugging me, snuggling me up to their old, repulsive faces.
Either that, or else they’d reach down swiftly, and before I could do anything, they’d pinch my fat little cheek, and hold on, shaking my jowls back and forth, for as long as they damn well pleased. And all the while they’d be gushing some rot about how good, or pretty, or well behaved I was.
I felt this to be extremely patronizing.
For you see, I was a rather precocious child. I didn’t like being called a baby. And, though now I no longer understand the appeal, I wanted to be an adult. By God, I could discuss the president-who was Kennedy-and the Pope, whoever the hell he was at the time.
I always wore a suit too, or at least a tie. All my clothes had to be green: that was my favorite color, still is. I was one eccentric little son of a bitch.
Anyway, to get back to the matter at hand, I had thought long about this problem, as long as a four year old has time to, and I had decided upon my course of action. I was just waiting for a test case.
Finally it came. I was sitting with my parents in a restaurant-King Fish, I think, since that was the only restaurant we ever went to. Of course I had on my best green suit, complete with tie.
Though I could barely see over the table, I was feeling very adult.
“Who’s the boss, the pope or the president?” I asked my father.
“What do you mean?”
“The Pope is the boss of religion, right?”
“Right.”
“And the president is the boss of the country. So which one is the boss of the other?”
“Uh, what do you think?”
“Well,” I reasoned, “since religion is higher than the country, I think the Pope must be the boss of the president.”
“Hmmm. It doesn’t exactly work that way.”
“Then how does it work?”
“Er...uh...” my father stammered, “It’s very complicated.”
Ha! So he didn’t know. And neither did my mother, whom I had asked earlier. This served to reconfirm my feelings of intellectual superiority over the adults around me.
While my father and I were having this penetrating intellectual discussion, up came the waitress to take our order. The waitress had a big, tall bun of blond hair on her head, and a face gooped with pancake makeup and mascara. She was smacking on a big mouthfull of gum. Horrible. I wanted to hide under the table. As soon as she laid eyes on me she squeeled, “Oh what a cute little baby!”
My parents were grinning like idiots; as usual they thought it was all a big joke. Good parents would have intervened to put a stop to the matter right then and there.
The waitress was moving around the table towards me. I could just feel her about ready to go for my cheek. She had sharp red claws on her fingers.
But this time I was ready, and I stopped her right in her tracks. I said, “Lady, I’m a midget.”
The waitress was dumbstruck: now she didn’t know what to think.
My parents laughed the matter off, assuring her I was only kidding, but clearly, they were embarrassed. With any luck, I felt, they had learned their lesson, and would refrain from putting me in such uncomfortable situations in the future.
126 Trade Winds Road
Bruce Genaro
It is Indian Summer on Cape Cod, that fifth season of the year that arrives without notice and then departs just as quickly. I am driving leisurely on route 6A through Truro, a town at the northern-most tip of this tiny peninsula. All the windows on the red Ford Mustang that I rented earlier this morning are down. The air is warm and yet cool, stagnant outside, but the wind whipping around inside the cabin tousles my hair, ruffles my shirt. The sun beating down, dances on the hood of the car, practically blinding me, mocking my sunglasses. The sand dunes on my right are piled higher than I remember and sprouting tufts of tall green sea grass. The gentle strains from some classical station leave the tiny speakers on the dashboard and drift out towards the ocean. At a certain point on this road (which I am fast approaching) you can turn left and head for the center of Provincetown, a quaint and cosy artist colony at the end of the world. Commercial Street dominates this city, aptly named for the hundreds of little antique stores, dress shops, tee-shirt emporiums and artists booths that dot the street on both sides. Instead, I keep the car pointed on its steady course towards the horizon and the National Seashore, a beige strip of sand that harbors so many fond memories for me. I am just two miles from the Herring Cove Beach parking lot when my eyes fill with tears. And as no thought precedes them, they seem to appear for no reason. But I know why they come and let the cool droplets tumble over my lashes and spill down my cheeks. The salty water feels cool as it evaporates, and changes energy, becoming some other part of the universe. Oddly, it makes me feel more alive.
The house sits up on a bluff at the end of town over-looking the Atlantic Ocean and the horizon. The bright orange roof surprises and pleases me as I approach it. Surprises because it is so unlike most of the other traditional “Cape Cod” homes in this enclave. Pleases because it reminds me of Todd, the friend who designed and built it eleven years ago. What strikes me most about the design of this house are the columns that support the roof and create a portico at the front. Huge Doric columns that bulge slightly at the center, magnificent in their simplicity, and painted white. Not just white, but a white so bright you are drawn into them. A white that has the intensity and vibrancy of colors usually only found in a rainbow or a Warhol painting. A white that seems to glow against the landscape and the sand and the gray slate of the building itself, intensified by a blazing October sun.
I turn right onto Trade Winds Road past that house with the ocean view and drive to the end of the cul-de-sac, stopping the car in front of another house. This one is a very large and modern looking building, all glass and angles, and I wonder how this design ever got past the planning commission. I shift the transmission into park, my right hand resting on the stick shift. I sit there for I don’t know how long, breathing deeply, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel to Ravels’ Bolero which is now flowing over the fm airwaves. This was a detour I hadn’t expected to make. A side trip I foolishly thought I could avoid. I want to get out of the car, walk up the front steps and ring the bell, but I am unable to move. Transfixed, I am here, yet I am somewhere-else. Several more minutes go by before I shift the car back into gear and pull into the driveway of 126 Trade Winds Road. As I get out of the car I flash back to all the floor plans and elevations that Todd showed me with such pride during the construction phase of this vacation home by the sea. Always asking my approval of marble samples, paint chips and wood stains, surely knowing that I idolized his talent and would never find fault with any of his choices. He inherently made the right decisions while I was only capable of verbalizing and agreeing with what he instinctively knew. His creativity sanctioned by my intellectualization.
It was twelve years ago last month that we met, several summers after Anita Bryant became a Nazi and The Post Office Restaurant poured all of their orange juice onto Commercial Street in protest. Several years before we would again be in the streets, protesting, this time for our lives. I remember sitting around the pool at The Great Western, an anonymous little motel on the outskirts of town. It was a week of hot weather and blue water. A Walkman with the only two tapes I had brought playing over and over. Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade and the voice of Grace Jones singing Autumn Leaves embedded in my head forever. The rental car, an extravagance I could ill afford during that period of my life, sat inactive in the parking lot for most of the week. I sat there by myself till the loneliness became unbearable, forcing me to don my tee shirt and 501’s and head off in search of validation. All of those summers seem to blend together as if they were one continuous holiday. Too much sun and too many boys. Nameless boys. A moment’s diversion. A detour from pain. For a few hours I was no longer invisible.
Standing at the Boatslip, a Miller Light in my right hand while the left is actively involved in peeling off the label. My right foot taps uncontrollably to the disco beat emanating from the dance floor, while the rest of me tries to appear aloof. To my right The Atlantic Ocean and to my left The Sea of Boys. Familiar faces parade by in tee shirts and tank tops followed by more nameless faces appearing on the deck for the first time and never to be seen again. Where did they come from? New York, San Francisco, Barcelona? Where will they go? Ten years later I will not recognize one familiar face. Where have they gone? Moved away? Coming next week-end? Dead? Dying? How many acquaintances will I never see again? How many friendships have I lost or never made? How many talented, interesting people have I had the opportunity to know and didn’t? Too timid was I to approach anyone. Too invested in putting up the front that I needed nothing and no-one. Standing there by myself, hoping, praying to be acknowledged, and when I was I would greet them with a slight smile and an air of indifference that tried to mask the loneliness that seemed to dominate my world.
“Hi” said Todd so effortlessly. “Hello” I said, looking in his eyes for a fraction of a second before returning my gaze to the amber bottle with its label in shreds. The silence that followed was deafening. I have always had a problem with silence, usually preferring to ramble on endlessly just to fill in the void. Todd was tall and lean and carried himself with confidence. He had blond hair and brown eyes, a combination I had only recently developed a weakness for. He shook my hand strong and hard and smiled brightly as we made introductions. It was a reprieve from the awkwardness of first introductions when I found out that Todd was an architect and a partner in a small local firm. I had just recently moved to Boston to attend the Boston Architectural Center, a four year program (usually completed in six) that leads to a Bachelors degree in Architecture. At least we had some common ground to stand on as we danced the getting-to-know-you waltz.
After about an hour of socializing and, well, yes, flirting, Todd and I decided to slip away from the throng of people and pounding music and grab a beer at a cafe around the corner. Todd discussed with me in detail problems he was having with a construction firm that was building a mini-mall in Andover. I bragged about how well my first studio project had been received. I was comfortable with him. Odd for me because I was never one to be comfortable with anyone or anything, including myself. Low self-esteem was a legacy from my parents and a somewhat common side-effect of being gay. I’d like to say that we didn’t sleep together that first night. I’d like to, but I can’t. I was putty in the hands of anyone who paid any attention to me back then. Besides, he was awfully damn cute. Any romantic notions I may have begun nurturing were dashed with the revelation that Todd had a partner, Jay. They had been together for five years. Jay was an intern at Boston General and was on call all that weekend, allowing Todd an infrequent bout of Bachelorhood. From that night on we were close friends, as close as I would allow, but now that I knew about Jay it was strictly platonic. He and Jay had a large circle of friends and eventually adopted me into their extended family although I resisted at every turn, fearful of any intimacy. Sex I could handle, relationships, friendships I couldn’t. For some reason they never gave up on me and I was thankful yet cautious of every invitation.
Having Todd as a friend allowed me to tolerate my job as a grunt, an apprenticing position with Jones & Brazzen that The BAC had secured for me. It was a large firm for an architectural office and lacked many of the things I was hoping to find while apprenticing, like mentorship, creativity and ethics. Jones & Brazzen was quite successful in their field, but not well liked in the community. They had a reputation for designing cookie-cutter buildings. I personally and openly referred to them as the J.C.Pennys of Architecture. Every office complex they designed (and I use the term loosely) seemed to be the same repeating pattern; a pre-cast concrete band followed by a band of gray reflective glass, followed by a precast concrete band for as many stories as the building had. It was with a combination of disappointment and satisfaction that I would read the Boston Globes’ scathing reviews of their latest building. The partners and principals of the firm were about as cliche as you could get. Many of them Boston Brahmins or Brahmin wannabes and way too many bow ties and round le Corbusier glasses for my taste. I spent my days as an outsider, drawing floor plans, running errands and keeping to myself as much as possible. My feelings for the designers always wavered somewhere between envy and contempt, and I survived by making the occasional phone call to Todd’s office for a sanity check and a little stroking.
I had dreams of one day joining Todd’s firm, but that was not to happen. I was not meant to be an architect, suffering hours and hours of solitary confinement with a pencil and a T-square, drawing (again, I use the term loosely) bathroom elevations and floor-plans at quarter inch scale. I remember sitting in class one of the first days of my first year, the lecturer asking us to look around the room at the other students. The auditorium contained about a hundred and fifty other people ranging in age from 20 years old to 50. He said, rather definitively, that only about ten of us would ever complete the curriculum that would lead to a degree. That was just the statistics. I don’t know why he told us that, but I remember swearing to myself that I would be one of the ones that made it. Two and a half years later I had dropped out, still working for Jones and Brazzen, but wondering what I was going to do with my life.
It was Todd who talked me out of being an architect and into being a writer. Although it pained me to admit it, I never did quite have the talent required to design buildings. I could appreciate them more completely than most people, certainly more than most outside of the industry, but I could never quite turn my appreciation into inspiration. It had become apparent to me that my essays always received better grades than my design projects. Not a good sign. While my appreciation for the use of space and materials only increased during that time, my execution and implementation of them failed miserably.
So, if I wasn’t going to be an architect there was no reason to hang around the east coast any longer, enduring those Arctic winters and shirt drenching summers. California or New York was where you went to be a writer, so I opted for warmer weather and moved to Mill Valley to be among my new peers. Over the next ten years I made annual visits to Connecticut to visit my family, always making it a point to fly into Boston first, rationalizing it with the fact there were no direct flights to Hartford. In the three years that I lived in Boston, Todd’s friendship and encouragement saw me through some very difficult times, exams, failed relationships and a minor drug habit to name a few. Todd was more a family member to me than my real family. Only now do I understand that the reason I saw my family so often over the past decade was to have an excuse to visit him no matter how brief my stay. I had made a good life for myself in California, but a good, true friendship like ours had failed to materialize for me again on this other more transient coast.
Unfortunately three thousand miles and ten years puts a great strain on a relationship, especially a friendship lacking those romantic ties that bind. As the years drifted past, our phone calls became ever more sporadic and letters dribbled down to a yearly vacation post-card. I blame myself for that, too fearful of rejection, even from a good friend, to pick up the phone just to chat. Fearful that the saying “out of sight, out of mind” was created with me in mind. In my case it was more like “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” He was always in my thoughts, always with me. I had imaginary conversations with him standing beside me on vacations as I marveled at the frescoes in Florence, lit candles in cathedrals in Rome or sat on the banks of the Seine taking pictures of Notre Dame. He was that rare thing, a true friend. And I put up as much resistance to him as I could. And when resistance didn’t work, I put up distance.
It was this past December, less than a year ago that I received the Christmas card from his partner Jay. The card that said matter-of-factly that Todd had passed away in October. I wrote back immediately with my regrets leaving out the part about my anger of not being told that he had even been sick. Of having been shut out of what was obviously a difficult time for him. Of not having had the opportunity to say good-bye. But I had no right to be angry, least of all with Jay. Maybe with myself. I have not been crying because Aids has finally touched my life. I have not been crying because Todd is gone. I cry because I never really let him know how much he meant to me. I cry for the life I have lost to fear. The fear that makes me push people away. The fear that if people “really” got to know me they wouldn’t like me. And now, here I stand on the steps of Jay’s home, the home that Todd designed and built, ringing a doorbell that my friend will never answer.
Stab
B. A. D. La Rosa
I’m being stabbed repeatedly, feeling nothing because it’s a dream. My corpse falls, the hub of a death-wheel whose spokes are inward-pointing knives.
My killers are all friends and family; long dead family members are back, standing among them.
My waking relationships don’t matter. They’ve all killed me. My fallen corpse watches a swirl of human shapes descend and do something to my face.
A man I’ve never seen before holds up my lips by the corners, a patch of ragged sliced flesh.
“See?” he announces to the pleased crowd. “We finally got him to smile.”
I awaken, and it’s enough. No cold sweat or stifled scream. Acceptance of nightmare, 5 a.m. alarm chirping cruelly (every day’s a second chance) returning to a living mortal body, sleepy, crusty eyes, leaden bones. Head aches because the pillow clamped it in a judo lock, neck dented with pain.
I have to get up and work, but I fool myself, motivate by telling myself I’m getting up because I really crave breakfast, bringing me off the floor out of my warm, torn sleeping bag. Sleep and food, the body’s tag-team partners.
Breakfast: half a cup of cold Pepsi. Peanut butter sandwiches, the grape jelly ice cold. Nourish and flourish.
I’m 26 and very old. Even MTV, with all its magic powers, couldn’t dramatize my life so that it’d appeal to anybody. Even my bouts with depression are boring; finicky masochists lose interest quickly.
With my gun, I own death. It sleeps in its hard plastic case, two clips full of hollow-point bullets gleaming like cool gold teeth. I rarely remove it from its case. Quaker Instant Death.
I’ve never put it to my head. I went through all of that as a teenager. I won’t do it. The Something that prevents the most ignoble person from Doing It, pulling the trigger with the barrel whispering in their ear, has long since returned to my skull. I am sane and safe.
So why horror?
I load the gun case into the truck. The law says No, but I carry it anyway. Can’t be too sane and safe.
Electrical work. Working towards a journeyman’s license. Company of four of us and my ballcap filled with sweat. Five of us, if you count that funny Mexican: Manuel Labor. Haw haw.
The people I work with: “Shitmouth” has ten years experience on me. His crooked teeth glisten as if slathered with movie-popcorn butter. His breath smells like burning plastic. And he’s subtly arrogant, a monstrous prick. He’s unkind.
Shan is a dope, a thirty-year-old Irish pasty with a rutilant crewcut. He’s a male airhead, rarely likable by me, a barrel of dislike.
The Boss is sniveling, brilliant, hasty, didactic. He’s fat with a Hitleresque mustache mercifully offset by a thick beard (Shan also has a beard, a rutilant Van Dyke.)
Goddamn you know how it is when you want to quit your job but it’s too late, you’re comfortable with its particular assaults on your dignity and happiness; you’d rather eat your old job’s bitter fruit than hunt meat on the plains where herds of new jobs might be, but the pain and suffering and uncertainty is endless. You get mud-stuck.
“Where do you go?” Shan asks, meaning for fun. I smile until Shitmouth comes around and changes the subject. I hate them both.
I hate people. There is nothing philosophical about it.
People are monsters, not to be trusted with anything important. If I were a Christian or some other religion it might make more sense, there’d be a context for the hatred. I had my childhood, and it was good, but it’s over now and I hate people.
The Boss has taken off again in his forest green truck. He is constantly leaving whatever work site we happen to be at. We’re laying conduit, burying it in a lawn. The sun slams everything with homicidal heat. Sweat sticks to my balls and caulks my ass crack. Not twenty feet away, in a red brick office building, shapes move freely behind blinds and tinted glass, a dance of paperwork and coffee to the sweet music of air conditioning. It’s so insane to be alive, to be here, in this heat. I feel that nobody cares, and if god ever returned he’d be angry I was wasting my time doing this. I wish I was stupid enough to love and believe in god. But there is no god in my life, only masters upon masters and somewhere close to the top god starts, one final master, a gigantic praying mantis cold to the touch, cold being ripped apart inside his mandibles. Only cats do not have masters.
I was lucky to get this job. The Boss likes me, and liked me from the start, one of those quirks. Maybe I remind him of some boy he had a crush on or respected when he was a kid. Not that he’s gay. I’d prefer if he was gay (though I’m not). I’d have more control of him. On the job I’m obeisant and do the best I can. I need my job. I have nothing else.
“Where do you go for fun?” Shan asks. His bitchy little gal whose father paid to have the fat sucked out of her ass gave up on him. She drove him crazy but I don’t think he was smart enough to know this until the end of whatever they had. She tried to control him and he, dumb dog that he is, eventually resisted. Once he asked me about marriage. I told him either marry many women or none at all. One is an unlucky number. I was embarrassed to contribute to his path, because then she was gone from his life, but not forgotten. Dumb dog. One for the fire.
“Where are the connectors?” I ask Shitmouth, and he throws me a look of appalled disbelief so incredibly out of proportion to my question I feel like smashing his fucking face in with a brick. He has a real name, but why should I use it? He’s not a decent human being. He’s a turd who somehow managed to grow limbs. The obscenities do the best in this world.
Shitmouth has a big, ugly ogre of a wife who is a great cook, and an ugly son, born with a cleft palate. The son (the thing) looks like the cat creature from the movie Sleepwalkers. Shitmouth is fascinating only in that he is the absolute inverse of the average joe. Instead of taking his job out on his wife and kid, he intensely loves his family, and thus is an ass-hole on the job.
Me, I’ve quickly learned that to be single in America is to be nothing. I’m 26. I’m in the mid-zone. I could be married or I could not be. When people inquire about my family it takes me a little bit to realize they mean one of my own, rather than my mom and dad and sibs. Hmm. There are pretty women (pretty . . . to what end?) but I don’t bother asking anymore. Some people roll with the punches but not me. I hate people. I’ll never be vulnerable again.
I read a lot. A quote by Somerset Maugham reads: The great tragedy of life is not that men perish, but that they cease to love.
I love my first phone! The only ballsy thing I ever did was hop in my ten-year-old Ford truck with the savings of my youth and haul ass to California. Now I’m here and rent my own place and own my first phone and address. I am proud. Somewhat poor for now, but very proud. The Boss has promised to send me to Vo tech and pay for it, so I can obtain a journeyman’s. And I just got word today my younger brother is also coming out to Cali. After five tortuous years at FSU, he earned a double major. He’s got a fantastic job as a computer systems consultant, and he’s going to work out of San Francisco. He called me from home.
It was kind of a shock. It took me five days to drive across the United States. I-10 all the way. It was a matter of pride. Now, here he comes, and I am so full of worry. Mother Nature - that bitch - has left the Defrost off over most of the country. Beards of ice and cold everywhere.
He starts the drive tomorrow.
“I’ll call you from . . . how far did you go?” he asks. I tell him he can make it probably 300 miles a day or more. He’ll stop and visit our twin sisters, at FSU, of course. I worry for him. He doesn’t own a firearm. And his car is running - good but old. I worry.
“So you got your furniture and everything?” Shan asks futilely. His rutilant red hair. Nobody can believe I don’t have furniture yet. I just don’t want any. No TV, bed, microwave. I eat cold soup from the can for dinner. I’m not homeless, just bedless, I try to joke. Nobody can believe it. My not buying furniture has people more upset than concentration camps.
Monday.
“I made it to Covington, Louisiana,” says my brother, calling from his hotel.
“And the car is fine? Good weather?”
“Yeah.”
“See you soon!”
That’s 400 miles.
“Mount the box,” Boss says, climbing into his truck. It lowers considerably and rocks with his added burden.
ME? I want to scream, panic rising from my belly like mercury. Shan and Shitmouth are working together on the other side of the building.
“Okay,” I say meekly. Boss seems not to notice. If he has faith in me he never shows it, and that’s bad. Scared, I go look for the circuit breaker box and the right tools. The sun curses and laughs and wrings the sweat from me with its fire. It can only burn.
Tuesday night.
“All day today I installed a breaker.”
“Oh,” says my brother? with as much interest as he can muster after driving 600 miles. I don’t mind. I love him. Really, I care about as much about that damned circuit breaker as he does. It’s just a job. He’s made it to Conrad, Texas. No storms . . . yet.
It took me forever to install the breaker, but I did it, came home and cried in the shower. Now its just a harmless memory, embedded in Lucite, in the past. Tomorrow we’ll all connect it. At night it’s cold to make the sun’s heat even more absurd. “Just be ready for Texas. It’s a whole day’s haul, even at 75.”
We talk about the happy past, full of laughter and jokes. I start to feel human again. My old family humor cheers up my brother. He is not a loner but he’s in a loner’s situation, driving across beautiful wastelands, big, purposeless country. I love him and wish we could all be together for awhile, the whole family.
But I’m supposed to have a family of my own now.
“Shan, what’s a good place to go out?” He looks at me uncertain, but I don’t smile, to let him know I need his help.
“The Blue Ram is good pub,” he says, then adds quickly, “Do you drink?”
“Sometimes,” I tell him. Not the way he and all of America drinks. “The Blue Ram sounds cool. I might go,” I lie.
“I felt like crying,” my brother tells me Wednesday night.
His progress is excellent. He not only whipped Texas but made it all the way to Lordsburg, New Mexico. Damn near 800 miles! The bridges ice well before the roads, he tells me. I remember the road signs warning of that, but when I made the drive in early January I got lucky, there was no violent cold snap, I tell him.
“I was scared. I bought gloves and a scarf in a small town and wore two pairs of sweat pants, it was so cold.” He’s safe now, and has called me last, after phoning the folks and our sisters. I hate you, Mother Nature. It should have been me you put through the grinder.
But I don’t really mean it. I drove out here over a month ago, it’s ancient history. I’ll die in California.
“You’ll make it here tomorrow,” I tell him. He reminds me he has rented a cellular phone in case of emergencies.
“Call if you need to, don’t worry about the cost,” I tell him, which is absurd. I’m the poor one, but I’m happy for my bro. My mom gave him six thousand dollars as a graduation gift. He deserved it. And I feel good that he is secure with so much money.
We talk some more before the final, “I love yous.” We mean them.
“My brother is driving cross-country, boss,” I tell him. We have hooked up the breaker and our work here is almost done. Shitmouth is in a particularly good mood and Shan is starting to smile more. Maybe he’s found a way back to his girl.
I have worked extra-diligently this morning, so I may ask now: “Would it be possible for me to leave early so I can meet him?”
“Go now, dude!” Shitmouth blurts, but he means it. The Boss, who is usually cool towards Shitmouth, looks at him. I say nothing. It’s a horribly tense moment, being at the mercy of others. Praying mantis praying mantis praying mantis.
Boss nods quietly. His cap has our company logo on it. It’s always fresh and clean. I think he has one of those ballcap washing frames you stick in the dishwasher, I think manically, heart racing as I run to my truck.
It’s weird to be home so early. The walls seem surprised to see me, the sunlight unsure.
The phone rings and I answer it, cutting off the machine. My hands are dry and dusty. I smell, a little. “I’m on Lucinda,” my brother tells me, on the cell phone.
Christ! I drive Lucinda nearly every day! He’s here!
“Okay! You’re going the right way!” Coming off the 405. Long Beach, California in its own way is as naive and lobotomized as my hometown in Florida. All the way across the United States and he doesn’t use the cell phone until he’s just two miles away!
I stand at the top of the cochina-embedded stairs when he appears around the corner, handsome, thinner, sweaty in the sun, his eyes bright and warm and expectant, recognizing the order of the apartment numbers.
My left arm shoots out in anticipation of the hug we will each receive as soon as he’s up. He’s on the fourth step when my arm straightens, my right arm, holding my gun. I close my eyes on him and the world. The sunlight striking the blood in my eyelids makes the blackness red. My finger freezes on the trigger. It feels like it weighs a million pounds.
Hurry! I know what he’s seeing and I want to scream for him. The gun explodes smoothly it’s first time outside of a range. My facial skin ripples from the shock wave and my ears pound hard, once.
The round is a tracer. My squint is open enough to catch the molten streak, my brother’s stomach disintegrating, thrown backwards in double handfuls as he is thrown like a puppet. He flies, slamming into the wall and the lamppost, guts unpackaging as he crumples into the mulch and underfed plants.
Much to my horror he doesn’t die instantly. I can’t scream or move. The gun has said everything but it cannot explain.
I can’t shoot again. I see him writhing, unable to look up at me. I don’t know if he’s seeing anything. His stomach had some food in it. Crackers, it looks like. Balloonfulls of blood. I can’t finish it.
Shan said the Blue Ram. I think about that. I shot the wrong person.
Doors are opening everywhere, except the apartment next to mine. My brother is almost dead. I don’t know why. There’s something amiss. I’m missing. I finally do scream. Inside my apartment I pick up the phone, and dial home.
“He’s dead!” I wail to my mother, and she knows instantly who and that I’m not lying. Who could ever joke about such things?
“No!” she cries, and I cry and cry and scream and curse. She thinks it was a car wreck. We both cry for him. The pressure wins. I’m going to tell her any minute. Police are coming, I know. They always arrive too late.
The sky does not open up.
No lightning strikes me.
Outside, birds chirp again.
I think of my brother racing to beat the cold. All the way across the country, to a senseless death. I claw my face with my left hand, still holding the receiver. My right hand is welded to the gun. Who will I shoot when the cops arrive?
Who should I shoot?
I hang up on my mother and run to the steps.
He’s lying there, still alive.
The police are coming. People are retching and screaming.
Because the monster has a face, one assumes he can be spoken to, reasoned with.
Not so. The gun halfway between my head and the base of the steps.
Not so.
I wish Shitmouth were coming and not the cops.
stalker
by janet kuypers
And she got out of her car, walked across her driveway, and walked up the stairs to her porch, trying to enjoy her solitude, trying not to remember that he had followed her once again. She thought she was free of him; she thought he moved on with his life and that she would not have to see his face again.
Why did he have to call her, on this one particular day, years later, while she was at work? Maybe if she could have been suspecting it, she might have been braced for it. But then again, she didn’t want to think about it: she was happy that she was finally starting to feel as if she had control of her life again.
It had been so many years, why would she have expected him to follow her again? Didn’t she make it clear years ago that she didn’t want him waiting outside her house in his car anymore, that she didn’t want to receive the hang-up calls at three in the morning anymore? Or the calls in the middle of the night, when he’d stay on the line, when she could tell that he was high, and he’d profess his love to her? Or the letters, or the threats? No, the police couldn’t do anything until he took action, when it was too late. Why did he come back? Why couldn’t he leave her alone? Why couldn’t it be illegal for someone to fill her with fear for years, to make her dread being in her house alone, to make her wonder if her feeling that she was being followed wasn’t real?
All these thoughts rushed through her head as she sat on her front porch swing, opening her mail. One bill, one piece of junk mail, one survey.
It was only a phone call, she had to keep thinking to herself. He may never call again. She had no idea where he was even calling from. For all she knew, he could have been on the other side of the country. It was only a phone call.
And then everything started to go wrong in her mind again, the bushes around the corner of her house were rustling a little too loud, there were too many cars that sounded like they were stopping near her house. Her own breathing even scared her.
I could go into the house, she thought, but she knew that she could be filled with fear there, too. Would the phone ring? Would there be a knock on the door? Or would he even bother with a knock, would he just break a window, let himself in, cut the phone lines so she wouldn’t stand a chance?
No, she knew better. She knew she had to stay outside, that she couldn’t let this fear take a hold of her again. And so she sat.
She looked at her phone bill again.
She heard the creak of the porch swing.
She swore she heard someone else breathing.
No, she wouldn’t look up from her bill, because she knew no one was there.
Then he spoke.
“Hi.”
She looked up. He was standing right at the base of her stairs, not six feet away from her.
“What are you doing on my property?”
“Oh, come on, you used to not hate me so much.” He lit a cigarette, a marlboro red, with a match. “So, why wouldn’t you take my call today?”
“Why would I? What do I have to say to you?”
“You’re really making a bigger deal out of this than it is,” he said, then took a drag. She watched the smoke come out of his mouth as he spoke. “We used to have it good.”
She got up, and walked toward him. She was surprised; in her own mind she never thought she’d actually be able to walk closer to him, she always thought she’d be running away. She stood at the top of the stairs.
“Can I have a smoke?”
“Sure,” he said, and he reached up to hand her the fire stick. She reached out for the matches.
“I’ll light it.”
She put the match to the end of the paper and leaves, watched it turn orange. She didn’t want this cigarette. She needed to look more calm. Calm. Just be calm.
She remained at the top of the stairs, and he stood only six stairs below her. She sat at the top stair.
“You really think we ever got along?”
“Sure. I mean, I don’t know how you got in your head -”
“Do you think I enjoyed finding your car outside my house all the time? Did I enjoy seeing you at the same bars I was at, watching my and my friends, like you were recording their faces into your memory forever? Do you think I liked you coming to bother me when I was working at the store? Do you -”
“I was.”
She paused. “You were what?”
“I was logging everyone you were with into my head.”
She sat silent.
“At the bars - I remember every face. I remember every one of them. I had to, you see, I had to know who was trying to take you away. I needed to know who they were.”
She sat still, she couldn’t blink, she stared at him, it was just as she was afraid it would be.
And all these years she begged him to stop, but nothing changed.
She couldn’t take it all anymore.
She put out her right hand, not knowing exactly what she’d do if she held his hand. He put his left hand in hers.
“You know,” she said, then paused for a drag of the red fire, “This state would consider what you did to me years ago stalking.”
She held his hand tighter, holding his fingers together. She could feel her lungs moving her up and down. He didn’t even hear her; he was fixated on looking at his hand in hers, until she caught his eyes with her own and then they stared, past the iris, the pupil, until they burned holes into each other’s heads with their stare.
“And you know,” she said, as she lifted her cigarette, “I do too.”
Then she quickly moved the cigarette toward their hands together, and put it out in the top of his hand.
He screamed. Grabbed his hand. Bent over. Pressed harder. Swore. Yelled.
She stood. Her voice suddenly changed.
“Now, I’m going to say this once, and I won’t say it again. I want you off my property. I want you out of my life. I swear to God, if you come within fifty feet of me or anything related to me or anything the belongs to me, I’ll get a court order, I’ll get a gun, I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you away forever.”
“Now go.”
He held his left hand with his right, the fingers on his right hand purple from the pressure he was using on the open sore. He moaned while she spoke. She stood at the top of the stairs looking down on him. He slowly walked away.
She thought for a moment she had truly taken her life back. She looked down. Clenched in the fist in her left hand was the cigarette she just put out.
poetry
only a year
helena wolfe
you know, it world be easier
if someone came along
someone new altogether
and swept me off my feet.
Someone tall, really tall,
and boyishly handsome,
and someone with way too much
money,
and someone who was strong,
and romantic.
someone I shouldn’t even be
thinking about,
because he doesn’t exist.
I feel like a character in a novel
who sees the protagonist
and thinks that they’re just too good
and can’t be real
I’m the only one that’s real
and my biological clock is ticking
and I’ve got a year to decide
only a year
and there’s so much I want to do
and there’s so much I want to say
and there’s so much I want to feel
and all I feel is lost
and I’m in a room full of people
and all I feel is alone
and I’ve only got a year
and the seconds are ticking away
and I can’t even think
of making a decision
and I can’t decide
how my life should unfold
will someone wait
for me
will anyone wait
for me
IS THE DOCTRINE OF DOUBLE EFFECT PLAUSIBLE?
courtney steele
When pondering the questions that arise in a situation where Euthanasia is concerned, a question that must be considered is:
Can one do something that one knows will have a certain consequence without intending to produce that certain consequence?
When studying the doctrine of Double Effects, the answer becomes more and more apparent.
The doctrine of Double Effects states that an action having both good and bad effects is plausible and permissible if the following two conditions are adequately served:
1) the bad effect is not intended in the certain situation as being the means or as the end, and
2) the good effect outweighs the bad effect.
In the situation of euthanasia, or in any situation where there can be both good effects and bad effects, the first condition deems itself as extremely important. In euthanasia’s case, the first condition states that death is not an intended result of the actions that are incurred. Therefore, it does seem plausible that, for example, a person who’s life is being supported by machinery and who is in a great deal of pain can receive medication that would in fact shorten that person’s life. However, it can then be argued that it is not considered morally right to give that patient a lethal dose of medication in order to alleviate that pain. A supporter of the doctrine of Double Effects would say in that situation that giving a lethal dose of medication would only serve to the end of killing that patient, instead of merely alleviating the pain. This, the supporter of the doctrine of Double Effects would say, is going against the first, and definitely more important, condition of permissibility in the doctrine itself, for one cannot administer the
lethal medication if the intention of administering that medication is to in fact kill the patient. Death in these cases cannot be the means or the end.
Therefore, according to the doctrine of Double Effects, an action in a particular situation can have a certain consequence without the subject intending on that certain consequence to actually happen.
T H E
L O T T E R Y
M O N S T E R
(C) By Paul Ll. Glaze
The Lottery Is A Very Good Game.
Trying To Win It Will Drive You Insane.
Your Money Goes Into Lottery Flows
And then From There Only Heaven Knows.
The Lottery Offers A You Lot Of Fun.
For A Few Hours You Are Surely The One.
The One Who Wins, And Then Ascends.
through Heavens Gate In Riches Blends.
Then After Moments Of Riches Schemes
You Only Awake From Dumb Day Dreams.
The Lottery Is Over And You Have Lost.
You Will Play Again At A Buck A Toss.
You Will Win With The Next Buck Or Two.
That’s What The Lottery Does To You.
But Playing The Lottery Is Sort Of Cool.
Don’t Spend Too Much As A Lotto’s Fool.
Keep Up Your Chin With Spirits Bright.
There Is Another Drawing Late Tonight.
You Now Will Win As The Numbers Fall.
Then Give Your New Friend, Paul A Call.
A Hand In A Shutting Door
Jesus Trejo
jtrejo@ccr.dsi.uanl.mx
Attraction between two bodies,
love or lust makes no difference.
Passion and instincts come into play,
love and lust are only in the way
like a hand in a shutting door.
Quietly inside two seeds collide,
they crash,mix and unite.
Quietly inside a life grows,
it expands,extends and multiplies
like a swarm of ants on a drop of sweet.
A miracle,a new life,
an innocent being with an innocent soul,
depending on his mother for protection,
depending on his father for support,
depending on both for survival.
A fragile gift,
a defenseless but unique formation,
an identity that will never be again.
A baby that would cry
for the least of attention.
A little girl that would run
into her own aspirations and dreams
from a toy to a book to a family.
A man that would die old
leaving behind a current of knowledge
with all his fantasies fulfilled.
A person,a life,a miracle.
But his rights were taken away,
his mother chose for him
what he had no idea of,
thinking he would be safe
as he layed growing,quietly inside.
Because he was was quiet he had no say,
he was seen as an error,a mistake,
a growing cancer of unwanted life,
he was only in the way
like a hand in a shutting door.
He was disposed of,discharged,thrown away
as a byproduct of intercourse
like a used condom of flesh,
whose heart stopped beating,
who was never given attention,
never ran into her dreams,
never fulfilled his fantasies,
never died old but did die
when on the condom the knot was tied,
when it fell into the waste basket
as from his mother he was scraped away,
torn away from what he thought was
protection,
what he thought was support and survival.
I guess I was wrong,
my parents should know better than me,
they have learned more than me,
they have lived longer than me.
I was only in the way
like a hand in a shutting door.
To Cleo
October, 1994 - January, 1996
I. Unmistakable
Fun to while away a morning at the office
interpreting each other’s dreams.
Tumors through a dear pet’s skin.
Grown from her bones like tree gnarls.
Deadly wood.
II. How Could She Scold Him?
The sweet cat dies,
the pal who slept on his bed.
The hugging, kissing talking cat
- Mom cries too.
The din: the boy hollering,
slamming his door.
Death’s a demon he’s driving off.
Like a backwoods “primitive”
banging a pan with a spoon.
III. Embarassing
to gush like any other
nitwitted animal lover:
the cat who died not just a cat.
You compared her to Jesus Christ!
A weekend of sobbing -
when Dad died, it wasn’t so sad.
Embarassing: no lament without guilt?
When she wanted more stroking,
you called her a pest.
Without cruelty?
At the end, she was ugly:
“what would I want with a defective cat?”
Mary Winters
SHEDDING CLOTHES
That chemise is what she wore.
The same one she’d thrown down
before clamoring all over my skin
before ascending to take my cards
beep within my descent into her vagina.
But in her second strut
she wore it to wear
wore it with my face pressed at wallet
nose sniffing, tongue licking
for what eyes couldn’t see
ears couldn’t hear. I looked
in the mirror to shave.
My lips, nose, ears...lastly
eyes were sliced away
with that razor...what chemise
will I wear?
Paul Weinman
LOVE WILL COME AGAIN
By Paul L. Glaze
She Fell In Love With A Married Man
Not Knowing Of His Commitment
Marriage Was Her Ultimate Plan
As She Surrendered In Contentment.
He Took Her Places Not To Be Seen.
Their Romance Was Closely Hidden.
Until His Wife Came On The Scene
And Exposed This Affair Forbidden.
Her Heart Was Broken As She Cried
Listening To His Wife’s Disclosure
He Had Lied, Her Had Heart Died
From Hearing Of This Exposure.
She Left Astray In Vulgar Display
Screaming And Cursing At Him.
Her Soul Was Torn With A Lovers Scorn
And Her Future Was Looking Dim.
He Phoned Her And Quickly Said,
His Lost Marriage Did Not Matter.
They Would Meet And Love Again
As He Continued In Idle Chatter.
Suddenly There Was A Massive Boom
The Sound Of Deathly Screaming.
Then Silence Filled The Room
Into The Phone, Is Wife Was Beaming.
I Must Apologize To You My Dear.
For I Heard My Husband Talking.
In His Head, I Shot Him Dead
And To Hell, Now He Is Walking.
Do Not Shed Despair Or Sorrow
His False Love Could Not Blend.
Look Forward To Another Tomorrow
As A New Lover, Fate Will Send
And Then Love Will Come Again!
Chris McKinnon
Well Bien
my good friend
fortune
has soured
you
on any good find
in the finding
of women
and
of well-fortuned
fame
and the flame
at the bottom
of your cup
may burn lower
and the stout
hardly flagrant
known gypsy
fall in his cups
and you
well-hung
(for a flame thrower’s
fortune - good)
good fortune
be with you
great friend
of fat may
recipe for pain
alice olds-ellington
vodka, 5 jiggers.
mix with gait disorder.
fall into stereo.
break ribcage.
vodka, 9 jiggers.
tell dad it’s orange juice.
fall somewhere else too drunk to remember where.
break left shoulder.
heal.
enough pain for 20 servings, 50 people. heal some more.
go crack-up on someone else’s property.
don’t count on dad.
he drinks, too.
maybe you can break your neck next time if you’re lucky.
maybe you can actually die some other way.
like the time on the subway at 71st St. which didn’t exist.
maybe you can find a gun so sinister it’ll scare all the bad guys.
meanwhile, the subway is pretty terrifying when the doors close.
the crowd won’t leave.
two guys need a drink so bad they shoot the whole dream.
Malignancy
By Peter Scott
I want to be strong
But I can’t
Life won’t let me
I was programmed to feel
And feel I do
The pain cuts deep
With a shadow constructed
Of hollow vibrations
Why did you have to
Enter my life?!?!
So I could write this poem
And the many others being written?
No!
You don’t mess my life like this
While little Miss Pretty
Acts like nothing’s wrong
I’m hurting
Something’s dying
I can sense it
Slowly
All that I’ve invested
Has come back to haunt
The love is hurting
For it isn’t love anymore
I can’t own your love
And when you took
That away from me
I stopped caring
You want experiences?
Feel my hate
In the creature I love the most
You taught me to invest
You taught me to commit
Helped me to write
Now you are teaching me to hate
You
Last night I had a dream
After hurting at night
I was at a party
You were there too
We didn’t like each other
But I changed that
Showed you my emotions
And you cared
Loved me
Cherished me
Sought better memories
Than our perfection in the past
We were together again
Until you were forced to leave
!Damn them!
Leave those institutions
There are paths
In every trail
While not as large
Or worn
You can travel
To any place you want
The decisions only seem bad
To those who envy
The key is to stay committed
Don’t let jealousy tell you
What is right or wrong
Listen to yourself
I do
I let the dreams run free
Come
!Damn you!
It is hopeless
You are what you are
...But you don’t have to be
I love you Amy
Don’t listen to that jealousy
Ask those who are vacant
In pain
They will tell you
What it means
To hold true meaning
Don’t rush through life
Live for the moments
Yes
You’ll miss his touch
I’ll miss her face
But we can’t go back
Touching every base
We must choose for good
Loss is inevitable
When you decide
Let it come from inside
I have to speak
Can’t stop to think
Or the cancer will eat me
Systematically
Until I am gone
It is slow
But continual
Notice the pain in my eyes
Suppressed duress
A girl at the counter
Sent me a smile
Someone who cared
And she did
For you can’t fake
Kindness
Maybe hide it
I know
But never fake it
I hate you
For loving me.
Melonaid
By Peter Scott
A musical concerto strings along my head
Before well
The really violent sounds emanate from the ether
Pulsing throbbing
Gyrations return no reward
Nothing compares to the thing
Hyper spirit rolling in my mind
Curse life
Curse death
Leave me in agony
Past our bedtime
Searching for a release
Whispers scurry about
Warn of a degeneration
Of our generation
And I believe them
Pity us
Please...
Turn the music dial
Give me something to scream with
My feet won’t stop
Shaking my ears
Body means nothing
While the soul is bare
Cover me
In the bloody juices of survival
I may soon break
Consume some letters
That all look the same
Ought it grant me a moan
Maybe I’ll be stoned?
Doesn’t matter
It all is the same
Never lonely dancing
To the beat in my brain
You have real problems
So do I
One is life
Mine is death.
Moralistic Death
By Peter Scott
I rose to the peak
Was burning so deep
Encased in my own
Creation
A moment fled
In a shard of spirited lust
Now back to my own daydreaming.
Jane Butkin Roth
RE: CONSTRUCTION
Remembering
Fifteen samples of gray tile
I woke, grabbed the flashlight
from my nightstand.
I searched, no
hunted the dark
for a hint of taupe
pink
warmth
While you held vigil
for gray
black
white
You slept
your body like the cold
hard surfaces, your comforts
bold granite, smooth
marble, only
black white gray
My revenge,
a private place no one would notice
Half bath, overflowing
with luscious plums, florals
eggplant, deep forest greens
Triumphant, golden
paper birds
carrying grapes
on their flight to freedom.
motions on the planet
shannon peppers
I don’t let anybody in to see me
to be a real part of my life
I talk to people
I get close to people
the only person that I can count on is me
I just need something that I can count on
what can I really lean on
what will never let me down
what will never desert me
nobody lives on this planet
people go through the motions
people are too afraid
to open themselves up
and they never get the chance
to really live
I don’t want to go through the motions
I want to live
but I’m afraid
if I don’t break out of my shell
I won’t see what the rest of the world is like
I wonder if I really want to know
~”Lovers Lane”~
By Paul L. Glaze
Lovers lane, where we played the game.
Sweet games of love were ours untame.
Constant love making was ever flowing.
Nights of our taking, delights of going!
Hide a blanket, off an old dusty road.
Beside bushes, the love god glowed.
On the hills, overlooking our town.
We got our thrills with love abound.
In a barn, on a stack of hay.
Where young ones used to play.
Now alone, two lovers lay.
They also play, in a different way.
On beaches, in the sand of moons glow.
Within our reaches, constant love flow.
Within waters, out of visual reach.
Molded love, was what we’d teach.
In an old boat on waters way.
The goddess of love had her say.
Boats were swaying too and fro,
Two bodies locked in loving glow..
Our car was vital down on lovers lane.
Without it, love wouldn’t be the same.
The back seat offered love untame.
We lit our fires of loves hot flame..
Think back my friend in loving trend,
Do your past memories have a blend?
Did you not seek forbidden loves gain,
To let hidden passions rule and reign.
Ecstatic nights of sweet delights,
That passion uncovers
On lovers lane!
we come home
to find
pete lee
the neighbor’s black
lab hanging from her
thick silver chain
tongue out to one side
eyes ahlf open and all
white where they were rolled
up to meet a vision
of escape from suburbia
that didn’t pan out
the contents of her
bladder and bowels
staining the grass below
the deep scratch marks
on our side of the wall
blood congealing
on her torn paws
A Retired Policeman Talks About Suicides He’s Seen.
janet kuypers
jkuypers22@aol.com
“I remember one lady, we found her
in her bathtub, she cut her throat. That’s
odd, for women, normally they take
pills, they don’t like to disfigure them-
selves. But she knew what she was
doing, cutting her throat in a full bath.
Less messy that way. Autopsy said
she was full of barbituates. She was
a nurse, that explained how she knew
how to do it, but then we found out
that she was pregnant, too. And to top
it off, her brother was a priest.”
she walks out
pete lee
on her abusive
husband with only
a single suitcase
so heavy it
takes her both hands
to carry
gets as far
as the main road
before the assholes
beging pulling
over to ask her
does she wanna ride.
his was an icy
religion he claimed
that all individual
suffering contributes
in a mysterious
way to a greater
good from the prom
pimple to the murdered
child from cancer
to heartburn that all
prayers are complaints
in disguise something
about tiny rocks
in a vast mosiac
something about a
lovely tapestry viewed
from the underside but
when his time came
you shouldv’r seen him
on his knees weeping
tears that fell like stones.
Couldn’t Take it Home
janet kuypers
jkuypers22@aol.com
I went out deer hunting oce with some buddies
of mine. Now, I’m not a big fan of deer meat, but
I went for the sport, I’m a pretty good shot.
And I saw when I went over a small wooded hill
a small lake amongst the trees, and right at the
edge of the water was a deer. So here was my chance.
I pulled out my shotgun, aimed, pulled the trigger.
Direct hit. It was still moving, so I walked
toward the deer. I hit the spinal cord, and the
back half of the deer was parylized. The thing was
dragging itself with its front two legs, trying to
crawl away.
I knew it was in pain. I looked at the deer. I pulled
out my .22 pistol and shot it in the head, and
left it there. I couldn’t take it home. My buddies
asked me why I left it there. Everything felt wrong.
I told them I didn’t want anything to do with it.
Leave it there. Leave it.
“Final Frontier”
Kay Lynn
Sailing in the sea of powdered snowflakes
I’m amused by winters chilling style.
Adoring every icicle
that decorates the barest limb,
and fills the air with frigid zephyr.
Glaciers calving
brilliantly birth-
an iceberg haven;
canopy to the ocean’s floor.
Quiet whispers of elegance
arrayed in pomping white,
exalts the tundra’s turning age
as whale tails field
a prick of sun,
mothering waterfalls
fodder the shore.
Greater than this wonderland...
to feel your warmth,
to hold your hand.
Catching a Muscovy
janet kuypers
jkuypers22@aol.com
One year, Doc Wiggins
decided he wanted to shoot
one of the Muscovy ducks
and have it for Thanksgiving.
As far as ducks go, the
Muscovies are pretty ugly -
the males look something like
turkeys, and in Southwest
Florida, in this heavily pop-
ulated area, they are so
used to people that they will
walk up to you, expecting food.
Well, one year, bless his heart,
Doc Wiggins decided he wanted
to shoot one for Thanksgiving
dinner, so I taught him how to
use my rifle and we went to a
nearby lake. Then Doc started to
worry. “What if my bullet ricochets
off the water and hits something
else?” So he was in a bit of a
panic, trying to figure out what
to do. So I told him just to sit
tight a minute, and sure enough,
a Muscovy walked right up to him
and looked at him. So Doc looked
at me, then the duck, and just
picked it up and brought it home.
MYSTIC MEMORIES
(C)1995 By Paul L. Glaze
Mystic Memories Of Yesteryear
How Gently They Do Unfold.
Bringing Forth Warmth And Cheer.
Nestling The Cradles Of Our Soul.
When We Relive What Used To Be
It Is Most Sadly That We Find.
Precious Dreams We Wish To See,
Are Faded Echoes Of Our Mind.
Covet Those Dreams Of Yesteryear
As Life Draws Down Its Curtain.
Now Is The Time To Hold Them Dear
As Our Future Is So Uncertain !
This was My Mother
Her Name was Dorothy
Nancy L’enz Hogan
Passionate always, never passive
shaking with courage
fighting for life for
me - her child, for her, as mother
together
Too much love in
distraction, with the struggles
of each day gnawing at the
fleeting thin repose of night
Life bites chunks from Life
devouring itself
The heart breaks with hunger
as love waits barefoot in the snow
FABRIC OF A KISS
Allison Eir Jenks
Young boy tattooed himself
To my velvet temper
My untamed parade.
Slapped him with melody,
he choked and smiled
in my hedonistic web.
Coma in my lane,
he swam for my height,
Thinking that was all
that kept him from me.
On a day
any heifer would do,
When an obscure light
was leaking from his eyes,
Like some buttery monster,
I granted him a minute
on that vinyl couch.
His dizzy feet came at me
With a swollen breeze
All I saw were chaotic scraps of light
and stray, red knots
My counterfeit kiss
peeled him to the skull.
Nine years of him
Packed in a kiss.
He heard parachutes of violins;
Swan beaks insisting love.
I saw a drowsy sow.
Still, my lips
tugged him to oblivion
The Message Never Came
(C)1995 By Paul L. Glaze
The Message Never Came.
I Waited In Silent Reverence.
In Feelings Of Worthless Shame,
My Soul Felt A Severance.
A Message I Prayed To Hear
Was Lost In Never Wild
It Was To Bring Me Cheer
Now I’m Lost As A Child.
Those Messages Of Cheering.
To Blend Within Our Schemes
Ones That Are Enduring,
Hopes To Fulfill Our Dreams.
I Now Sat Alone In Solitude
With Only Myself To Blame.
Lost Feelings, I Now Conclude,
An Inner, Somber Refrain.
For The Message
Never Came.
bosnia again
Ray Heinrich
ray@vais.net
Even shallow graves come at a premium
so you are lucky for this because the
ones that come after will find your
bones and maybe figure out who you
are and tell your daughter who
survived and was only raped every
day for three months can tell her
you’re dead and allow you to rest
and you to be identified so you
can be added to the list so maybe
one in ten thousand can be brought
to trial for war crimes which is
more than it used to be so i guess
you’re lucky. We have only to ask
your daughter.
UNDER THE BARRACKS
Taylor Graham
jalapep@spider.lloyd.com
Black, so black you’d have to
scrape your fingernails against
the walls and hope for sparks.
So black you can hear it tap
against your eardrum,
hear the zing of wiring
and seven-storied concrete
on your head; the ooze
of water along pipes, the drips
and surges. You’ve hit
that vein, a lode, a duct,
an aquifer that knows
the underside of daylight.
You could give yourself
to its current, which is purely
black.
ginger says grace
Raymond L. Heinrich
ray@scribbledyne.com
it’s thanksgiving
at ginger’s parents
and ginger is saying
a beautiful grace
before dinner
and i’m there because her real boyfriend
is a biker with too many tattoos
and would cause too much trouble
and besides
her daughter
also a ginger
performs much better
when i’m there
so i get to live my fantasy
here’s ginger my love
(and she really is)
sitting beside me
and we laugh together
and our daughter across the table
charms her grandmother
and the turkey is wonderful
and the mashed potatoes and stuffing
are better
and i’m doing a great job
playing the fiancee
for this family
who wants so much to believe
that i have made her whole again
and we continue
to have a wonderful time
even while ginger
is throwing up in the guest bathroom
the day Teddy the big German Shepherd guard dog tried to eat my brother alive
michael estabrook
He was a beautiful dog, belonging
to a beautiful woman with long
black hair and languid
green eyes. She was married
to a nervous gnome
of a man, a pharmacist
who owned 9 pharmacies who hired us
to paint his house both inside and out.
The outside part was no problem
because Teddy was kept
inside, which made,
of course, painting inside
a somewhat troublesome ordeal especially
seeing as Teddy’s reason for living
was to protect the beautiful mistress
of the house. “Hey, Mr. W., can you get
Teddy to move away from the door,
I have to paint it.”
“I can’t. Paint around him.”
“Hey, Mr. W., can you get
Teddy to stop rubbing his tail
all into the wet paint?” “I can’t.
Paint it over again.”
Apparently, when the gnomic Mr. W. wed
to the beautiful Mrs. W. the dog
came along on the honeymoon; it rarely
left her side. (CanÕt say
as I blame him either.) No wonder
good old Mr. W. was the nervous type.
But never was he more nervous
than on that pleasant sunny
afternoon when Teddy crashed his way
out through the front door
and chased my brother Todd
halfway up
the damn ladder, coming
back down again with a patch of soiled
painterÕs pants clenched firmly
in his quivering German Shepherd jaws.
Virtuoso Performance by the Left Hemisphere
Alan Catlin
The pitcher reads all the significant
signs, considers the runner, the plate,
winds up, throws a line drive off
the centerfield wall that bounces onto
the artificial grass, the ball could roll
forever, just beyond the fielder’s reach,
rounding second, the runner trips,
the crowd is cheering, all the runs
must score or else the game of life is lost,
the four men in blue are folding
their arms close to their chests, considering
the man who fell to earth, clutching
his torn thigh muscle, the rolling ball
in the outfield, the best way
to call for the end of time.
FOR ANNE
Joyce Carbone
mojoy@cyberstreet.com
Half way to the moon,
I stopped, tredded ice-cold air,
paused to let self catch-up
the way Anne’s book did
as it reached from the shelf,
begged pity to take an orphan
rejected, home -
I did, and searched slowly,
found Anne’s reason tucked inside,
“I remember we named you Joyce
So we could call you Joy.”
This small milky mouse was stunned,
mesmerized by happenstance.
No, or is it yes?
Resounds in brain maze
lost in the wilderness
of bad boys & badder girls.
That phrase beckoned.
“We named you Joy.”
Waved lengths jumped, arched
a pyramidial rick-rack
up and down my spine.
Nothing is new under the sun.
My eyes leaked
as I read Anne’s pain;
The words reaching out;
words she left for me.
Dragonsalad
by Christophe Brunski
Easy to compare our souls
To the very first flying machines
Trembling, unstable skeletons
We throw ourselves and each other
Off cliffs and hillsides
Pushed onwards in our actions
By the music of music blaring in our ears
And below our skin
Though with our bodies we are motionless while
Yellow paint and plaster dust
Trickle down the wall like domesticated rain
There is thunder at the door
The pounding fists of the Deus ex Machina
Whose entry we have forbidden
The three of us
She passes to me
As she would a cup and saucer
Her dog-blue eyes
And touches the otherÕs eyelid
Feels it below her finger
Curved and supple yet slightly in retreat
Like an angelÕs breast
Fragility is ecstasy
A madonna and her sister
Sitting on the bed
With a Modigliani tacked to the wall behind them
The summer is a dragon
With green-leaf scales
And a womanÕs tongue
Which first deceives me
With promised warmth
Then pulls me into its
Belly of acerbic despair
Around the sandstone neck
Of the statue of the Asian Goddess
Someone had placed a dandelion necklace
A chain of stems and yellow florets
I used to look up at her
From across the caf where
Ghouls dressed in chains and dreamt in black
With a mystical gesture she widened my eyes
And I, chewing my thumbnail already split from prying open
Lockets full of downward spirals
Struggled to compose a suitable dedication
And despite my vain attempts to perfect upon her silence
Her gentle smile never fell or faltered
Her look of consolation was as constantly unchanging
As the sentences which form the bottoms of
Innumerable
Bodies of
Water
THE MISSIONARY’S CONTRACT
Richard Fein
bardbyte@chelsea.ios.com
It was legal, all the usual procedures were followed:
the ink in my blood, a proper seal, quality parchment,
the usual lightning and thunder from above.
No mistakes as to the contracting parties,
I dealt with no yes-man underling,
I shook hands with the boss himself.
Cloven hooves, pitchfork, he was in his proper business attire.
He tried all the usual perks:
money, women, chairman of the board of mega-conglomerate inc.,
but I had read Faust.
Then he found his opening, the child.
One of so many, fever above 105,
I had to hold her upright just to breathe.
Prevailed upon a visiting big shot physician,
whose third world tour was being covered by the press.
He tried, the world was watching, but his photo opportunity was lost.
The child had drifted beyond pain.
Was then I hawked my soul, shouted my offer, acceptance, contract.
Done deal, we didn’t even do lunch.
The physician reassembled the press, flashbulbs were spent.
The villagers called him great healer. Obviously, I kept my mouth shut.
Now I have the devil to pay.
Payment is due at midnight, the usual hour.
Of all the swindled, I exacted the highest price.
I can take pride in that.
cancer
Ray Heinrich
ray@vais.net
hard to mention cancer
lightly
politely
if you open your mouth
the death’s head
might pop out
M I L L E N N I U M
By Paul L. Glaze
A Thousand Years From Yesterday
Mankind Will Grow Much Taller.
His Body Will Be Thin, Pale And Gray.
The Bone Structure Will Become Smaller.
His Face Becomes Much Larger In Size.
A Cranium With Hugh Eye Sockets
A Brain And Intellect He Will Realize
Capable Of Mind Projection Rockets
He Will Clothe Himself In Robe Like Gowns
These Will Cover His Thin Physique
His Face Will Become Bland As With Frowns
To Disguise Glittering Thoughts Unique.
His Mind Will Become To Brilliant To Capture.
Personal Levitation Will Be Within Its Laws.
When As A Child Of Seven He Will Rapture
This Natural Feat Will Be A Juvenile Cause
Travel Will Be Made By Spiritual Connection
They May Journey To Any Desirable Place
This Will Be Done By Astral Projection
The Spirit Travels, The Body Stays At Base.
This Will Not Be Done Without Evolution
It Will Come By Wars , Death And Tears
There Will Be A Spiritual World Revolution
This Will Involve A Millennia Of Years
Man Is His Spirit, This He Will Realize
He Is An Immortal, As This Spirit Never Dies
He Will Endure One More Millennia.
As He Sows And Grows In Spiritual Size.
Then He Will Shine With Brighter Glows
In Our Gracious Gods Golden Eyes.
philosophy monthly
1689
A LETTER CONCERNING TOLERATION
by John Locke
part 2 of 2
translated by William Popple
You will say, by this rule, if some congregations should have a mind to sacrifice infants, or (as the primitive Christians were falsely accused) lustfully pollute themselves in promiscuous uncleanness, or practise any other such heinous enormities, is the magistrate obliged to tolerate them, because they are committed in a religious assembly? I answer: No. These things are not lawful in the ordinary course of life, nor in any private house; and therefore neither are they so in the worship of God, or in any religious meeting. But, indeed, if any people congregated upon account of religion should be desirous to sacrifice a calf, I deny that that ought to be prohibited by a law. Meliboeus, whose calf it is, may lawfully kill his calf at home, and burn any part of it that he thinks fit. For no injury is thereby done to any one, no prejudice to another man’s goods. And for the same reason he may kill his calf also in a religious meeting. Whether the doing so be well-pleasing to God or no, it is their part to consider that do it. The part of the magistrate is only to take care that the commonwealth receive no prejudice, and that there be no injury done to any man, either in life or estate. And thus what may be spent on a feast may be spent on a sacrifice. But if peradventure such were the state of things that the interest of the commonwealth required all slaughter of beasts should be forborne for some while, in order to the increasing of the stock of cattle that had been destroyed by some extraordinary murrain, who sees not that the magistrate, in such a case, may forbid all his subjects to kill any calves for any use whatsoever? Only it is to be observed that, in this case, the law is not made about a religious, but a political matter; nor is the sacrifice, but the slaughter of calves, thereby prohibited.
By this we see what difference there is between the Church and the Commonwealth. Whatsoever is lawful in the Commonwealth cannot be prohibited by the magistrate in the Church. Whatsoever is permitted unto any of his subjects for their ordinary use, neither can nor ought to be forbidden by him to any sect of people for their religious uses. If any man may lawfully take bread or wine, either sitting or kneeling in his own house, the law ought not to abridge him of the same liberty in his religious worship; though in the Church the use of bread and wine be very different and be there applied to the mysteries of faith and rites of Divine worship. But those things that are prejudicial to the commonweal of a people in their ordinary use and are, therefore, forbidden by laws, those things ought not to be permitted to Churches in their sacred rites. Only the magistrate ought always to be very careful that he do not misuse his authority to the oppression of any Church, under pretence of public good.
It may be said: “What if a Church be idolatrous, is that also to be tolerated by the magistrate?” I answer: What power can be given to the magistrate for the suppression of an idolatrous Church, which may not in time and place be made use of to the ruin of an orthodox one? For it must be remembered that the civil power is the same everywhere, and the religion of every prince is orthodox to himself. If, therefore, such a power be granted unto the civil magistrate in spirituals as that at Geneva, for example, he may extirpate, by violence and blood, the religion which is there reputed idolatrous, by the same rule another magistrate, in some neighbouring country, may oppress the reformed religion and, in India, the Christian. The civil power can either change everything in religion, according to the prince’s pleasure, or it can change nothing. If it be once permitted to introduce anything into religion by the means of laws and penalties, there can be no bounds put to it; but it will in the same manner be lawful to alter everything, according to that rule of truth which the magistrate has framed unto himself. No man whatsoever ought, therefore, to be deprived of his terrestrial enjoyments upon account of his religion. Not even Americans, subjected unto a Christian prince, are to be punished either in body or goods for not embracing our faith and worship. If they are persuaded that they please God in observing the rites of their own country and that they shall obtain happiness by that means, they are to be left unto God and themselves. Let us trace this matter to the bottom. Thus it is: An inconsiderable and weak number of Christians, destitute of everything, arrive in a Pagan country; these foreigners beseech the inhabitants, by the bowels of humanity, that they would succour them with the necessaries of life; those necessaries are given them, habitations are granted, and they all join together, and grow up into one body of people. The Christian religion by this means takes root in that country and spreads itself, but does not suddenly grow the strongest. While things are in this condition peace, friendship, faith, and equal justice are preserved amongst them. At length the magistrate becomes a Christian, and by that means their party becomes the most powerful. Then immediately all compacts are to be broken, all civil rights to be violated, that idolatry may be extirpated; and unless these innocent Pagans, strict observers of the rules of equity and the law of Nature and no ways offending against the laws of the society, I say, unless they will forsake their ancient religion and embrace a new and strange one, they are to be turned out of the lands and possessions of their forefathers and perhaps deprived of life itself. Then, at last, it appears what zeal for the Church, joined with the desire of dominion, is capable to produce, and how easily the pretence of religion, and of the care of souls, serves for a cloak to covetousness, rapine, and ambition.
Now whosoever maintains that idolatry is to be rooted out of any place by laws, punishments, fire, and sword, may apply this story to himself. For the reason of the thing is equal, both in America and Europe. And neither Pagans there, nor any dissenting Christians here, can, with any right, be deprived of their worldly goods by the predominating faction of a court-church; nor are any civil rights to be either changed or violated upon account of religion in one place more than another.
But idolatry, say some, is a sin and therefore not to be tolerated. If they said it were therefore to be avoided, the inference were good. But it does not follow that because it is a sin it ought therefore to be punished by the magistrate. For it does not belong unto the magistrate to make use of his sword in punishing everything, indifferently, that he takes to be a sin against God. Covetousness, uncharitableness, idleness, and many other things are sins by the consent of men, which yet no man ever said were to be punished by the magistrate. The reason is because they are not prejudicial to other men’s rights, nor do they break the public peace of societies. Nay, even the sins of lying and perjury are nowhere punishable by laws; unless, in certain cases, in which the real turpitude of the thing and the offence against God are not considered, but only the injury done unto men’s neighbours and to the commonwealth. And what if in another country, to a Mahometan or a Pagan prince, the Christian religion seem false and offensive to God; may not the Christians for the same reason, and after the same manner, be extirpated there?
But it may be urged farther that, by the law of Moses, idolaters were to be rooted out. True, indeed, by the law of Moses; but that is not obligatory to us Christians. Nobody pretends that everything generally enjoined by the law of Moses ought to be practised by Christians; but there is nothing more frivolous than that common distinction of moral, judicial, and ceremonial law, which men ordinarily make use of. For no positive law whatsoever can oblige any people but those to whom it is given. “Hear, O Israel,” sufficiently restrains the obligations of the law of Moses only to that people. And this consideration alone is answer enough unto those that urge the authority of the law of Moses for the inflicting of capital punishment upon idolaters. But, however, I will examine this argument a little more particularly.
The case of idolaters, in respect of the Jewish commonwealth, falls under a double consideration. The first is of those who, being initiated in the Mosaical rites, and made citizens of that commonwealth, did afterwards apostatise from the worship of the God of Israel. These were proceeded against as traitors and rebels, guilty of no less than high treason. For the commonwealth of the Jews, different in that from all others, was an absolute theocracy; nor was there, or could there be, any difference between that commonwealth and the Church. The laws established there concerning the worship of One Invisible Deity were the civil laws of that people and a part of their political government, in which God Himself was the legislator. Now, if any one can shew me where there is a commonwealth at this time, constituted upon that foundation, I will acknowledge that the ecclesiastical laws do there unavoidably become a part of the civil, and that the subjects of that government both may and ought to be kept in strict conformity with that Church by the civil power. But there is absolutely no such thing under the Gospel as a Christian commonwealth. There are, indeed, many cities and kingdoms that have embraced the faith of Christ, but they have retained their ancient form of government, with which the law of Christ hath not at all meddled. He, indeed, hath taught men how, by faith and good works, they may obtain eternal life; but He instituted no commonwealth. He prescribed unto His followers no new and peculiar form of government, nor put He the sword into any magistrate’s hand, with commission to make use of it in forcing men to forsake their former religion and receive His.
Secondly, foreigners and such as were strangers to the commonwealth of Israel were not compelled by force to observe the rites of the Mosaical law; but, on the contrary, in the very same place where it is ordered that an Israelite that was an idolater should be put to death,* there it is provided that strangers should not be vexed nor oppressed. I confess that the seven nations that possessed the land which was promised to the Israelites were utterly to be cut off; but this was not singly because they were idolaters. For if that had been the reason, why were the Moabites and other nations to be spared? No: the reason is this. God being in a peculiar manner the King of the Jews, He could not suffer the adoration of any other deity (which was properly an act of high treason against Himself) in the land of Canaan, which was His kingdom. For such a manifest revolt could no ways consist with His dominion, which was perfectly political in that country. All idolatry was, therefore, to be rooted out of the bounds of His kingdom because it was an acknowledgment of another god, that is say, another king, against the laws of Empire. The inhabitants were also to be driven out, that the entire possession of the land might be given to the Israelites. And for the like reason the Emims and the Horims were driven out of their countries by the children of Esau and Lot; and their lands, upon the same grounds, given by God to the invaders.*(2) But, though all idolatry was thus rooted out of the land of Canaan, yet every idolater was not brought to execution. The whole family of Rahab, the whole nation of the Gibeonites, articled with Joshua, and were allowed by treaty; and there were many captives amongst the Jews who were idolaters. David and Solomon subdued many countries without the confines of the Land of Promise and carried their conquests as far as Euphrates. Amongst so many captives taken, so many nations reduced under their obedience, we find not one man forced into the Jewish religion and the worship of the true God and punished for idolatry, though all of them were certainly guilty of it. If any one, indeed, becoming a proselyte, desired to be made a denizen of their commonwealth, he was obliged to submit to their laws; that is, to embrace their religion. But this he did willingly, on his own accord, not by constraint. He did not unwillingly submit, to show his obedience, but he sought and solicited for it as a privilege. And, as soon as he was admitted, he became subject to the laws of the commonwealth, by which all idolatry was forbidden within the borders of the land of Canaan. But that law (as I have said) did not reach to any of those regions, however subjected unto the Jews, that were situated without those bounds.
* Exod. 22, 20, 21.
*(2) Deut. 2.
Thus far concerning outward worship. Let us now consider articles of faith.
The articles of religion are some of them practical and some speculative. Now, though both sorts consist in the knowledge of truth, yet these terminate simply in the understanding, those influence the will and manners. Speculative opinions, therefore, and articles of faith (as they are called) which are required only to be believed, cannot be imposed on any Church by the law of the land. For it is absurd that things should be enjoined by laws which are not in men’s power to perform. And to believe this or that to be true does not depend upon our will. But of this enough has been said already. “But.” will some say; “let men at least profess that they believe.” A sweet religion, indeed, that obliges men to dissemble and tell lies, both to God and man, for the salvation of their souls! If the magistrate thinks to save men thus, he seems to understand little of the way of salvation. And if he does it not in order to save them, why is he so solicitous about the articles of faith as to enact them by a law?
Further, the magistrate ought not to forbid the preaching or professing of any speculative opinions in any Church because they have no manner of relation to the civil rights of the subjects. If a Roman Catholic believe that to be really the body of Christ which another man calls bread, he does no injury thereby to his neighbour. If a Jew do not believe the New Testament to be the Word of God, he does not thereby alter anything in men’s civil rights. If a heathen doubt of both Testaments, he is not therefore to be punished as a pernicious citizen. The power of the magistrate and the estates of the people may be equally secure whether any man believe these things or no. I readily grant that these opinions are false and absurd. But the business of laws is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for the safety and security of the commonwealth and of every particular man’s goods and person. And so it ought to be. For the truth certainly would do well enough if she were once left to shift for herself. She seldom has received and, I fear, never will receive much assistance from the power of great men, to whom she is but rarely known and more rarely welcome. She is not taught by laws, nor has she any need of force to procure her entrance into the minds of men. Errors, indeed, prevail by the assistance of foreign and borrowed succours. But if Truth makes not her way into the understanding by her own light, she will be but the weaker for any borrowed force violence can add to her. Thus much for speculative opinions. Let us now proceed to practical ones.
A good life, in which consist not the least part of religion and true piety, concerns also the civil government; and in it lies the safety both of men’s souls and of the commonwealth. Moral actions belong, therefore, to the jurisdiction both of the outward and inward court; both of the civil and domestic governor; I mean both of the magistrate and conscience. Here, therefore, is great danger, lest one of these jurisdictions intrench upon the other, and discord arise between the keeper of the public peace and the overseers of souls. But if what has been already said concerning the limits of both these governments be rightly considered, it will easily remove all difficulty in this matter.
Every man has an immortal soul, capable of eternal happiness or misery; whose happiness depending upon his believing and doing those things in this life which are necessary to the obtaining of God’s favour, and are prescribed by God to that end. It follows from thence, first, that the observance of these things is the highest obligation that lies upon mankind and that our utmost care, application, and diligence ought to be exercised in the search and performance of them; because there is nothing in this world that is of any consideration in comparison with eternity. Secondly, that seeing one man does not violate the right of another by his erroneous opinions and undue manner of worship, nor is his perdition any prejudice to another man’s affairs, therefore, the care of each man’s salvation belongs only to himself. But I would not have this understood as if I meant hereby to condemn all charitable admonitions and affectionate endeavours to reduce men from errors, which are indeed the greatest duty of a Christian. Any one may employ as many exhortations and arguments as he pleases, towards the promoting of another man’s salvation. But all force and compulsion are to be forborne. Nothing is to be done imperiously. Nobody is obliged in that matter to yield obedience unto the admonitions or injunctions of another, further than he himself is persuaded. Every man in that has the supreme and absolute authority of judging for himself. And the reason is because nobody else is concerned in it, nor can receive any prejudice from his conduct therein.
But besides their souls, which are immortal, men have also their temporal lives here upon earth; the state whereof being frail and fleeting, and the duration uncertain, they have need of several outward conveniences to the support thereof, which are to be procured or preserved by pains and industry. For those things that are necessary to the comfortable support of our lives are not the spontaneous products of nature, nor do offer themselves fit and prepared for our use. This part, therefore, draws on another care and necessarily gives another employment. But the pravity of mankind being such that they had rather injuriously prey upon the fruits of other men’s labours than take pains to provide for themselves, the necessity of preserving men in the possession of what honest industry has already acquired and also of preserving their liberty and strength, whereby they may acquire what they farther want, obliges men to enter into society with one another, that by mutual assistance and joint force they may secure unto each other their properties, in the things that contribute to the comfort and happiness of this life, leaving in the meanwhile to every man the care of his own eternal happiness, the attainment whereof can neither be facilitated by another man’s industry, nor can the loss of it turn to another man’s prejudice, nor the hope of it be forced from him by any external violence. But, forasmuch as men thus entering into societies, grounded upon their mutual compacts of assistance for the defence of their temporal goods, may, nevertheless, be deprived of them, either by the rapine and fraud of their fellow citizens, or by the hostile violence of foreigners, the remedy of this evil consists in arms, riches, and multitude of citizens; the remedy of the other in laws; and the care of all things relating both to one and the other is committed by the society to the civil magistrate. This is the original, this is the use, and these are the bounds of the legislative (which is the supreme) power in every commonwealth. I mean that provision may be made for the security of each man’s private possessions; for the peace, riches, and public commodities of the whole people; and, as much as possible, for the increase of their inward strength against foreign invasions.
These things being thus explained, it is easy to understand to what end the legislative power ought to be directed and by what measures regulated; and that is the temporal good and outward prosperity of the society; which is the sole reason of men’s entering into society, and the only thing they seek and aim at in it. And it is also evident what liberty remains to men in reference to their eternal salvation, and that is that every one should do what he in his conscience is persuaded to be acceptable to the Almighty, on whose good pleasure and acceptance depends their eternal happiness. For obedience is due, in the first place, to God and, afterwards to the laws.
But some may ask: “What if the magistrate should enjoin anything by his authority that appears unlawful to the conscience of a private person?” I answer that, if government be faithfully administered and the counsels of the magistrates be indeed directed to the public good, this will seldom happen. But if, perhaps, it do so fall out, I say, that such a private person is to abstain from the action that he judges unlawful, and he is to undergo the punishment which it is not unlawful for him to bear. For the private judgement of any person concerning a law enacted in political matters, for the public good, does not take away the obligation of that law, nor deserve a dispensation. But if the law, indeed, be concerning things that lie not within the verge of the magistrate’s authority (as, for example, that the people, or any party amongst them, should be compelled to embrace a strange religion, and join in the worship and ceremonies of another Church), men are not in these cases obliged by that law, against their consciences. For the political society is instituted for no other end, but only to secure every man’s possession of the things of this life. The care of each man’s soul and of the things of heaven, which neither does belong to the commonwealth nor can be subjected to it, is left entirely to every man’s self. Thus the safeguard of men’s lives and of the things that belong unto this life is the business of the commonwealth; and the preserving of those things unto their owners is the duty of the magistrate. And therefore the magistrate cannot take away these worldly things from this man or party and give them to that; nor change propriety amongst fellow subjects (no not even by a law), for a cause that has no relation to the end of civil government, I mean for their religion, which whether it be true or false does no prejudice to the worldly concerns of their fellow subjects, which are the things that only belong unto the care of the commonwealth.
But what if the magistrate believe such a law as this to be for the public good? I answer: As the private judgement of any particular person, if erroneous, does not exempt him from the obligation of law, so the private judgement (as I may call it) of the magistrate does not give him any new right of imposing laws upon his subjects, which neither was in the constitution of the government granted him, nor ever was in the power of the people to grant, much less if he make it his business to enrich and advance his followers and fellow-sectaries with the spoils of others. But what if the magistrate believe that he has a right to make such laws and that they are for the public good, and his subjects believe the contrary? Who shall be judge between them? I answer: God alone. For there is no judge upon earth between the supreme magistrate and the people. God, I say, is the only judge in this case, who will retribute unto every one at the last day according to his deserts; that is, according to his sincerity and uprightness in endeavouring to promote piety, and the public weal, and peace of mankind. But What shall be done in the meanwhile? I answer: The principal and chief care of every one ought to be of his own soul first, and, in the next place, of the public peace; though yet there are very few will think it is peace there, where they see all laid waste.
There are two sorts of contests amongst men, the one managed by law, the other by force; and these are of that nature that where the one ends, the other always begins. But it is not my business to inquire into the power of the magistrate in the different constitutions of nations. I only know what usually happens where controversies arise without a judge to determine them. You will say, then, the magistrate being the stronger will have his will and carry his point. Without doubt; but the question is not here concerning the doubtfulness of the event, but the rule of right.
But to come to particulars. I say, first, no opinions contrary to human society, or to those moral rules which are necessary to the preservation of civil society, are to be tolerated by the magistrate. But of these, indeed, examples in any Church are rare. For no sect can easily arrive to such a degree of madness as that it should think fit to teach, for doctrines of religion, such things as manifestly undermine the foundations of society and are, therefore, condemned by the judgement of all mankind; because their own interest, peace, reputation, everything would be thereby endangered.
Another more secret evil, but more dangerous to the commonwealth, is when men arrogate to themselves, and to those of their own sect, some peculiar prerogative covered over with a specious show of deceitful words, but in effect opposite to the civil right of the community. For example: we cannot find any sect that teaches, expressly and openly, that men are not obliged to keep their promise; that princes may be dethroned by those that differ from them in religion; or that the dominion of all things belongs only to themselves. For these things, proposed thus nakedly and plainly, would soon draw on them the eye and hand of the magistrate and awaken all the care of the commonwealth to a watchfulness against the spreading of so dangerous an evil. But, nevertheless, we find those that say the same things in other words. What else do they mean who teach that faith is not to be kept with heretics? Their meaning, forsooth, is that the privilege of breaking faith belongs unto themselves; for they declare all that are not of their communion to be heretics, or at least may declare them so whensoever they think fit. What can be the meaning of their asserting that kings excommunicated forfeit their crowns and kingdoms? It is evident that they thereby arrogate unto themselves the power of deposing kings, because they challenge the power of excommunication, as the peculiar right of their hierarchy. That dominion is founded in grace is also an assertion by which those that maintain it do plainly lay claim to the possession of all things. For they are not so wanting to themselves as not to believe, or at least as not to profess themselves to be the truly pious and faithful. These, therefore, and the like, who attribute unto the faithful, religious, and orthodox, that is, in plain terms, unto themselves, any peculiar privilege or power above other mortals, in civil concernments; or who upon pretence of religion do challenge any manner of authority over such as are not associated with them in their ecclesiastical communion, I say these have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate; as neither those that will not own and teach the duty of tolerating all men in matters of mere religion. For what do all these and the like doctrines signify, but that they may and are ready upon any occasion to seize the Government and possess themselves of the estates and fortunes of their fellow subjects; and that they only ask leave to be tolerated by the magistrate so long until they find themselves strong enough to effect it?
Again: That Church can have no right to be tolerated by the magistrate which is constituted upon such a bottom that all those who enter into it do thereby ipso facto deliver themselves up to the protection and service of another prince. For by this means the magistrate would give way to the settling of a foreign jurisdiction in his own country and suffer his own people to be listed, as it were, for soldiers against his own Government. Nor does the frivolous and fallacious distinction between the Court and the Church afford any remedy to this inconvenience; especially when both the one and the other are equally subject to the absolute authority of the same person, who has not only power to persuade the members of his Church to whatsoever he lists, either as purely religious, or in order thereunto, but can also enjoin it them on pain of eternal fire. It is ridiculous for any one to profess himself to be a Mahometan only in his religion, but in everything else a faithful subject to a Christian magistrate, whilst at the same time he acknowledges himself bound to yield blind obedience to the Mufti of Constantinople, who himself is entirely obedient to the Ottoman Emperor and frames the feigned oracles of that religion according to his pleasure. But this Mahometan living amongst Christians would yet more apparently renounce their government if he acknowledged the same person to be head of his Church who is the supreme magistrate in the state.
Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration. As for other practical opinions, though not absolutely free from all error, if they do not tend to establish domination over others, or civil impunity to the Church in which they are taught, there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated.
It remains that I say something concerning those assemblies which, being vulgarly called and perhaps having sometimes been conventicles and nurseries of factions and seditions, are thought to afford against this doctrine of toleration. But this has not happened by anything peculiar unto the genius of such assemblies, but by the unhappy circumstances of an oppressed or ill-settled liberty. These accusations would soon cease if the law of toleration were once so settled that all Churches were obliged to lay down toleration as the foundation of their own liberty, and teach that liberty of conscience is every man’s natural right, equally belonging to dissenters as to themselves; and that nobody ought to be compelled in matters of religion either by law or force. The establishment of this one thing would take away all ground of complaints and tumults upon account of conscience; and these causes of discontents and animosities being once removed, there would remain nothing in these assemblies that were not more peaceable and less apt to produce disturbance of state than in any other meetings whatsoever. But let us examine particularly the heads of these accusations.
You will say that assemblies and meetings endanger the public peace and threaten the commonwealth. I answer: If this be so, why are there daily such numerous meetings in markets and Courts of Judicature? Why are crowds upon the Exchange and a concourse of people in cities suffered? You will reply: “Those are civil assemblies, but these we object against are ecclesiastical.” I answer: It is a likely thing, indeed, that such assemblies as are altogether remote from civil affairs should be most apt to embroil them. Oh, but civil assemblies are composed of men that differ from one another in matters of religion, but these ecclesiastical meetings are of persons that are all of one opinion. As if an agreement in matters of religion were in effect a conspiracy against the commonwealth; or as if men would not be so much the more warmly unanimous in religion the less liberty they had of assembling. But it will be urged still that civil assemblies are open and free for any one to enter into, whereas religious conventicles are more private and thereby give opportunity to clandestine machinations. I answer that this is not strictly true, for many civil assemblies are not open to everyone. And if some religious meetings be private, who are they (I beseech you) that are to be blamed for it, those that desire, or those that forbid their being public! Again, you will say that religious communion does exceedingly unite men’s minds and affections to one another and is therefore the more dangerous. But if this be so, why is not the magistrate afraid of his own Church; and why does he not forbid their assemblies as things dangerous to his Government? You will say because he himself is a part and even the head of them. As if he were not also a part of the commonwealth, and the head of the whole people!
Let us therefore deal plainly. The magistrate is afraid of other Churches, but not of his own, because he is kind and favourable to the one, but severe and cruel to the other. These he treats like children, and indulges them even to wantonness. Those he uses as slaves and, how blamelessly soever they demean themselves, recompenses them no otherwise than by galleys, prisons, confiscations, and death. These he cherishes and defends; those he continually scourges and oppresses. Let him turn the tables. Or let those dissenters enjoy but the same privileges in civils as his other subjects, and he will quickly find that these religious meetings will be no longer dangerous. For if men enter into seditious conspiracies, it is not religion inspires them to it in their meetings, but their sufferings and oppressions that make them willing to ease themselves. Just and moderate governments are everywhere quiet, everywhere safe; but oppression raises ferments and makes men struggle to cast off an uneasy and tyrannical yoke. I know that seditions are very frequently raised upon pretence of religion, but it is as true that for religion subjects are frequently ill treated and live miserably. Believe me, the stirs that are made proceed not from any peculiar temper of this or that Church or religious society, but from the common disposition of all mankind, who when they groan under any heavy burthen endeavour naturally to shake off the yoke that galls their necks. Suppose this business of religion were let alone, and that there were some other distinction made between men and men upon account of their different complexions, shapes, and features, so that those who have black hair (for example) or grey eyes should not enjoy the same privileges as other citizens; that they should not be permitted either to buy or sell, or live by their callings; that parents should not have the government and education of their own children; that all should either be excluded from the benefit of the laws, or meet with partial judges; can it be doubted but these persons, thus distinguished from others by the colour of their hair and eyes, and united together by one common persecution, would be as dangerous to the magistrate as any others that had associated themselves merely upon the account of religion? Some enter into company for trade and profit, others for want of business have their clubs for claret. Neighbourhood joins some and religion others. But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotions, and that is oppression.
You will say “What, will you have people to meet at divine service against the magistrate’s will?” I answer: Why, I pray, against his will? Is it not both lawful and necessary that they should meet? Against his will, do you say? That is what I complain of; that is the very root of all the mischief. Why are assemblies less sufferable in a church than in a theatre or market? Those that meet there are not either more vicious or more turbulent than those that meet elsewhere. The business in that is that they are ill used, and therefore they are not to be suffered. Take away the partiality that is used towards them in matters of common right; change the laws, take away the penalties unto which they are subjected, and all things will immediately become safe and peaceable; nay, those that are averse to the religion of the magistrate will think themselves so much the more bound to maintain the peace of the commonwealth as their condition is better in that place than elsewhere; and all the several separate congregations, like so many guardians of the public peace, will watch one another, that nothing may be innovated or changed in the form of the government, because they can hope for nothing better than what they already enjoy- that is, an equal condition with their fellow-subjects under a just and moderate government. Now if that Church which agrees in religion with the prince be esteemed the chief support of any civil government, and that for no other reason (as has already been shown) than because the prince is kind and the laws are favourable to it, how much greater will be the security of government where all good subjects, of whatsoever Church they be, without any distinction upon account of religion, enjoying the same favour of the prince and the same benefit of the laws, shall become the common support and guard of it, and where none will have any occasion to fear the severity of the laws but those that do injuries to their neighbours and offend against the civil peace?
That we may draw towards a conclusion. The sum of all we drive at is that every man may enjoy the same rights that are granted to others. Is it permitted to worship God in the Roman manner? Let it be permitted to do it in the Geneva form also. Is it permitted to speak Latin in the market-place? Let those that have a mind to it be permitted to do it also in the Church. Is it lawful for any man in his own house to kneel, stand, sit, or use any other posture; and to clothe himself in white or black, in short or in long garments? Let it not be made unlawful to eat bread, drink wine, or wash with water in the church. In a word, whatsoever things are left free by law in the common occasions of life, let them remain free unto every Church in divine worship. Let no man’s life, or body, or house, or estate, suffer any manner of prejudice upon these accounts. Can you allow of the Presbyterian discipline? Why should not the Episcopal also have what they like? Ecclesiastical authority, whether it be administered by the hands of a single person or many, is everywhere the same; and neither has any jurisdiction in things civil, nor any manner of power of compulsion, nor anything at all to do with riches and revenues.
Ecclesiastical assemblies and sermons are justified by daily experience and public allowance. These are allowed to people of some one persuasion; why not to all? If anything pass in a religious meeting seditiously and contrary to the public peace, it is to be punished in the same manner and no otherwise than as if it had happened in a fair or market. These meetings ought not to be sanctuaries for factious and flagitious fellows. Nor ought it to be less lawful for men to meet in churches than in halls; nor are one part of the subjects to be esteemed more blamable for their meeting together than others. Every one is to be accountable for his own actions, and no man is to be laid under a suspicion or odium for the fault of another. Those that are seditious, murderers, thieves, robbers, adulterers, slanderers, etc., of whatsoever Church, whether national or not, ought to be punished and suppressed. But those whose doctrine is peaceable and whose manners are pure and blameless ought to be upon equal terms with their fellow-subjects. Thus if solemn assemblies, observations of festivals, public worship be permitted to any one sort of professors, all these things ought to be permitted to the Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, Arminians, Quakers, and others, with the same liberty. Nay, if we may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. The Gospel commands no such thing. The Church which “judgeth not those that are without”* wants it not. And the commonwealth, which embraces indifferently all men that are honest, peaceable, and industrious, requires it not. Shall we suffer a Pagan to deal and trade with us, and shall we not suffer him to pray unto and worship God? If we allow the Jews to have private houses and dwellings amongst us, why should we not allow them to have synagogues? Is their doctrine more false, their worship more abominable, or is the civil peace more endangered by their meeting in public than in their private houses? But if these things may be granted to Jews and Pagans, surely the condition of any Christians ought not to be worse than theirs in a Christian commonwealth.
* I Cor. 5. 12, 13.
You will say, perhaps: “Yes, it ought to be; because they are more inclinable to factions, tumults, and civil wars.” I answer: Is this the fault of the Christian religion? If it be so, truly the Christian religion is the worst of all religions and ought neither to be embraced by any particular person, nor tolerated by any commonwealth. For if this be the genius, this the nature of the Christian religion, to be turbulent and destructive to the civil peace, that Church itself which the magistrate indulges will not always be innocent. But far be it from us to say any such thing of that religion which carries the greatest opposition to covetousness, ambition, discord, contention, and all manner of inordinate desires, and is the most modest and peaceable religion that ever was. We must, therefore, seek another cause of those evils that are charged upon religion. And, if we consider right, we shall find it to consist wholly in the subject that I am treating of. It is not the diversity of opinions (which cannot be avoided), but the refusal of toleration to those that are of different opinions (which might have been granted), that has produced all the bustles and wars that have been in the Christian world upon account of religion. The heads and leaders of the Church, moved by avarice and insatiable desire of dominion, making use of the immoderate ambition of magistrates and the credulous superstition of the giddy multitude, have incensed and animated them against those that dissent from themselves, by preaching unto them, contrary to the laws of the Gospel and to the precepts of charity, that schismatics and heretics are to be outed of their possessions and destroyed. And thus have they mixed together and confounded two things that are in themselves most different, the Church and the commonwealth. Now as it is very difficult for men patiently to suffer themselves to be stripped of the goods which they have got by their honest industry, and, contrary to all the laws of equity, both human and divine, to be delivered up for a prey to other men’s violence and rapine; especially when they are otherwise altogether blameless; and that the occasion for which they are thus treated does not at all belong to the jurisdiction of the magistrate, but entirely to the conscience of every particular man for the conduct of which he is accountable to God only; what else can be expected but that these men, growing weary of the evils under which they labour, should in the end think it lawful for them to resist force with force, and to defend their natural rights (which are not forfeitable upon account of religion) with arms as well as they can? That this has been hitherto the ordinary course of things is abundantly evident in history, and that it will continue to be so hereafter is but too apparent in reason. It cannot indeed, be otherwise so long as the principle of persecution for religion shall prevail, as it has done hitherto, with magistrate and people, and so long as those that ought to be the preachers of peace and concord shall continue with all their art and strength to excite men to arms and sound the trumpet of war. But that magistrates should thus suffer these incendiaries and disturbers of the public peace might justly be wondered at if it did not appear that they have been invited by them unto a participation of the spoil, and have therefore thought fit to make use of their covetousness and pride as means whereby to increase their own power. For who does not see that these good men are, indeed, more ministers of the government than ministers of the Gospel and that, by flattering the ambition and favouring the dominion of princes and men in authority, they endeavour with all their might to promote that tyranny in the commonwealth which otherwise they should not be able to establish in the Church? This is the unhappy agreement that we see between the Church and State. Whereas if each of them would contain itself within its own bounds- the one attending to the worldly welfare of the commonwealth, the other to the salvation of souls- it is impossible that any discord should ever have happened between them. Sed pudet hoec opprobria. etc. God Almighty grant, I beseech Him, that the gospel of peace may at length be preached, and that civil magistrates, growing more careful to conform their own consciences to the law of God and less solicitous about the binding of other men’s consciences by human laws, may, like fathers of their country, direct all their counsels and endeavours to promote universally the civil welfare of all their children, except only of such as are arrogant, ungovernable, and injurious to their brethren; and that all ecclesiastical men, who boast themselves to be the successors of the Apostles, walking peaceably and modestly in the Apostles’ steps, without intermeddling with State Affairs, may apply themselves wholly to promote the salvation of souls.
FAREWELL.
PERHAPS it may not be amiss to add a few things concerning heresy and schism. A Turk is not, nor can be, either heretic or schismatic to a Christian; and if any man fall off from the Christian faith to Mahometism, he does not thereby become a heretic or schismatic, but an apostate and an infidel. This nobody doubts of; and by this it appears that men of different religions cannot be heretics or schismatics to one another.
We are to inquire, therefore, what men are of the same religion. Concerning which it is manifest that those who have one and the same rule of faith and worship are of the same religion; and those who have not the same rule of faith and worship are of different religions. For since all things that belong unto that religion are contained in that rule, it follows necessarily that those who agree in one rule are of one and the same religion, and vice versa. Thus Turks and Christians are of different religions, because these take the Holy Scriptures to be the rule of their religion, and those the Alcoran. And for the same reason there may be different religions also even amongst Christians. The Papists and Lutherans, though both of them profess faith in Christ and are therefore called Christians, yet are not both of the same religion, because these acknowledge nothing but the Holy Scriptures to be the rule and foundation of their religion, those take in also traditions and the decrees of Popes and of these together make the rule of their religion; and thus the Christians of St. John (as they are called) and the Christians of Geneva are of different religions, because these also take only the Scriptures, and those I know not what traditions, for the rule of their religion.
This being settled, it follows, first, that heresy is a separation made in ecclesiastical communion between men of the same religion for some opinions no way contained in the rule itself; and, secondly, that amongst those who acknowledge nothing but the Holy Scriptures to be their rule of faith, heresy is a separation made in their Christian communion for opinions not contained in the express words of Scripture. Now this separation may be made in a twofold manner:
1. When the greater part, or by the magistrate’s patronage the stronger part, of the Church separates itself from others by excluding them out of her communion because they will not profess their belief of certain opinions which are not the express words of the Scripture. For it is not the paucity of those that are separated, nor the authority of the magistrate, that can make any man guilty of heresy, but he only is a heretic who divides the Church into parts, introduces names and marks of distinction, and voluntarily makes a separation because of such opinions.
2. When any one separates himself from the communion of a Church because that Church does not publicly profess some certain opinions which the Holy Scriptures do not expressly teach.
Both these are heretics because they err in fundamentals, and they err obstinately against knowledge; for when they have determined the Holy Scriptures to be the only foundation of faith, they nevertheless lay down certain propositions as fundamental which are not in the Scripture, and because others will not acknowledge these additional opinions of theirs, nor build upon them as if they were necessary and fundamental, they therefore make a separation in the Church, either by withdrawing themselves from others, or expelling the others from them. Nor does it signify anything for them to say that their confessions and symbols are agreeable to Scripture and to the analogy of faith; for if they be conceived in the express words of Scripture, there can be no question about them, because those things are acknowledged by all Christians to be of divine inspiration and therefore fundamental. But if they say that the articles which they require to be professed are consequences deduced from the Scripture, it is undoubtedly well done of them who believe and profess such things as seem unto them so agreeable to the rule of faith. But it would be very ill done to obtrude those things upon others unto whom they do not seem to be the indubitable doctrines of the Scripture; and to make a separation for such things as these, which neither are nor can be fundamental, is to become heretics; for I do not think there is any man arrived to that degree of madness as that he dare give out his consequences and interpretations of Scripture as divine inspirations and compare the articles of faith that he has framed according to his own fancy with the authority of Scripture. I know there are some propositions so evidently agreeable to Scripture that nobody can deny them to be drawn from thence, but about those, therefore, there can be no difference. This only I say- that however clearly we may think this or the other doctrine to be deduced from Scripture, we ought not therefore to impose it upon others as a necessary article of faith because we believe it to be agreeable to the rule of faith, unless we would be content also that other doctrines should be imposed upon us in the same manner, and that we should be compelled to receive and profess all the different and contradictory opinions of Lutherans, Calvinists, Remonstrants, Anabaptists, and other sects which the contrivers of symbols, systems, and confessions are accustomed to deliver to their followers as genuine and necessary deductions from the Holy Scripture. I cannot but wonder at the extravagant arrogance of those men who think that they themselves can explain things necessary to salvation more clearly than the Holy Ghost, the eternal and infinite wisdom of God.
Thus much concerning heresy, which word in common use is applied only to the doctrinal part of religion. Let us now consider schism, which is a crime near akin to it; for both these words seem unto me to signify an ill-grounded separation in ecclesiastical communion made about things not necessary. But since use, which is the supreme law in matter of language, has determined that heresy relates to errors in faith, and schism to those in worship or discipline, we must consider them under that distinction.
Schism, then, for the same reasons that have already been alleged, is nothing else but a separation made in the communion of the Church upon account of something in divine worship or ecclesiastical discipline that is not any necessary part of it. Now, nothing in worship or discipline can be necessary to Christian communion but what Christ our legislator, or the Apostles by inspiration of the Holy Spirit, have commanded in express words.
In a word, he that denies not anything that the Holy Scriptures teach in express words, nor makes a separation upon occasion of anything that is not manifestly contained in the sacred text- however he may be nicknamed by any sect of Christians and declared by some or all of them to be utterly void of true Christianity- yet in deed and in truth this man cannot be either a heretic or schismatic.
These things might have been explained more largely and more advantageously, but it is enough to have hinted at them thus briefly to a person of your parts.
END
from the original web version of cc&d:
Take The Pain
by Janet Kuypers
When I’m laying down in the sun
I close my eyes only so slightly
And the sun beats down and burns my face
And it penetrates my eyelids and scorches
My eyes. I strain to keep from squinting.
I struggle to keep my eyes just lightly closed
To survive the scorching light, the burning.
Do you understand this struggle, do you do this
To see how long you can take the pain
You know, when I struggle like this under the light
I can feel my lips beginning to part
And I almost expect you to reach over and kiss me
There’s a fine line between pleasure and pain
When I’m laying down in the sun
I close my eyes only so slightly
And I take the pain
Thank you, women who work I
Thank you, women who work
In this way you make
an indispensable contribution
to the growth of a culture
which unites reason and feeling,
to a model of life ever open
to the sense of “mystery”
Letter to Women, Message of His Holiness POPE JOHN PAUL II, July 10
Thank you, women who work
because you take on the responsibilities of men
while still having to be mothers, wives
good little daughters a feminine creatures
Thank you, women who work
because you are the ones we can blame
when the family falls apart
Thank you, women who work
because you make a point to do more
than your fair share
even though
no man would do the same for you
Thank you, women who work
for you know you have to prove yourselves
over and over and over again
and that it still isn’t enough, so
keep up the good work,
ladies
Mrs. Lee pled guilty to one count of animal cruelty. In addition to probation, she was given a minimal fine and ordered to take dog training lessons and to perform 80 hours of community service at the Humane Society of Ramsey County. And perhaps most shocking, Judge Johnson allowed JR to be returned to Mrs. Lee after he had been treated for his injuries.
In contrast, the city of Eden Prairie showed that it takes animal abuse seriously when it recently prosecuted Eden Prairie resident Karl Pemberton for the abuse and torture of two cats, Talon and Scrunt. According to the police report, Pemberton repeatedly slammed Talon’s tail in a door, placed him in scalding hot water, and threw him off a 30-foot deck several times. After Talon died, Pemberton cut off his head, legs, and tail, slit open his underside, and gutted him. Pemberton was sentenced by a Hennepin County judge on September 26 to serve 10 days in the workhouse and to pay restitution.
What you can do:
Call Judge Johnson at (612) 266-8203 and protest his lenient treatment of Yvonne Lee. Also call
prosecuting attorney Steve Christie at (612) 266-8740 and the Mayor’s complaint line at (612)
266-8989. Tell Christie and Mayor Coleman that St. Paul needs to take animal abuse seriously
and to give the enforcement of anti-cruelty laws a higher priority.
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.
Humane Education Gaining Acceptance in the Schools
by Dr. Heidi Greger
For the third year in a row ARC exhibited at the Minnesota Education Association/Minnesota Federation of Teachers Professional Conference to encourage compassion and humane education in school curricula. Our focus was on alternatives to dissection, and we distributed a multitude of grade-specific material on the subject. The response from teachers and students alike was so positive we were concerned we would run out of material within the first few hours of the conference! In addition to the pamphlets, brochures, and anti-dissection resource catalogs we offered to conference attendees, the software program Visifrog was on display, providing an interactive teaching tool designed to educate students about the anatomy and physiology of the frog without requiring the frog to give up his/her life. We also showed the video “Classroom Cutups,” which exposes the truth about how biological supply companies obtain and treat “specimens” for use in school dissection classes. Perhaps the high point of the day came when a seventh grader watching the video commented, “After seeing this, I don’t think I’ll be dissecting.” Indeed, the truth shall set the animals free.
ARC expanded its educational outreach program this year by participating in the Minnesota Science Teachers Association Conference for the first time. Countless science teachers stopped by our booth offering encouraging comments and requesting information on how they could convince their students not to dissect! Even more heartening was that the teachers were primarily concerned with the ethics of dissection and how best to convey a compassionate viewpoint to their students. Despite the high cost of participating in these educational events, ARC believes our presence is vital at such conferences. We must continue to be a strong and resounding voice for the animals by protecting the “life” in the life sciences. If you agree that this outreach effort is a valuable undertaking, please consider signing up as a staffer at one or both of these conferences next year. Your support and participation will ensure that ARC’s message of compassion is spread far and wide.
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.
Light Burning Out For Tigers - WWF
By Philippe Naughton
GENEVA (Reuter) - Wild tigers, once the undisputed kings of the jungle, are disappearing at the rate of one a day and now stand on the verge of extinction, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said.
In a report, Tigers in the Wild, WWF said habitat destruction and increased poaching for skins and body parts meant the global tiger population could be as low as 4,600.
Three tiger sub-species, the Bali, Javan and Caspian, have already been driven into extinction this century.
“Tragically, the remaining five sub-species are at risk of meeting the same fate. The tiger faces an onslaught of poaching throughout its range,” said the report, written by WWF experts Elizabeth Kemf and Peter Jackson.
Wild tigers are still found in 13 Asian countries, including India and China, as well as Russia.
The U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) forbids international trade in tiger parts such as bones, which are coveted for use in traditional Chinese medicines, but WWF said poaching was continuing.
In India, home to two-thirds of the world’s tigers, the government is waging a battle against poachers. Contraband tiger bones and skins seized last year were estimated to account for 73 tigers, but WWF estimated that 300-400 may have been lost out of a possible total of 3,000.
The tigers of Indochina have been hit both by loss of their forest home and poaching for traditional medicines, which are used in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea and even exported to the United States and Europe.
Cambodia, which has a tiger population of between 100 and 300, has sold two-thirds of remaining tiger forests to logging concessions and tigers are being killed there at the rate of two to three a month, the report says.
The species most at risk of extinction are the South China tiger, of which less than 50 remain in the wild, and the Siberian tiger, whose numbers have halved over the past five years to around 200.
One problem for conservationists is that Chinese demand for tiger part imports has been rising over the past decade as domestic stocks declined. The killing of 3,000 tigers as pests in the 1950s and 1960s had provided large stocks in China.
The authors of the report say counting tigers is notoriously difficult - the big cats live secretly in dense forests and often the only sign of their presence is a scratch on a tree.
According to their best estimate the global total is between 4,600 and 7,200, but tigers struggle for living space despite their slight numbers. In India, where 60 percent of the world’s wild tigers roam, human population has increased by 50 percent over the last 20 years.
“If the demand for tiger products can be eliminated and anti-poaching measures stepped up until tiger populations are restored, conservationists can prevent one of conservation’s most important symbols from its imminent fate: extinction early in the next century,” the report said.
“Small numbers of tigers could linger on for some decades, but the species would die off slowly...Like the tiger itself, we must fight for its survival.”
ST. PAUL RESIDENTS ASK THE CITY TO STOP SELLING FAMILY PETS FOR EXPERIMENTATION
ST. PAUL - Citizens Against Pound Seizure, a coalition of concerned citizens, pet owners, and humane organizations, will testify before a meeting of the Operations Committee of the St. Paul City Council They will ask the City to stop the sale of unclaimed pound animals to the University of Minnesota, (Minnesota’s pound seizure law allows pounds to sell unclaimed animals for experimentation upon request, a practice known as pound seizure.)
Since March 9,1995, the St. Paul Pound has turned over at least 85 dogs and cats to the University of Minnesota for experimentation. The University last purchased animals from the St. Paul Pound in 1989, but discontinued the practice after meeting public opposition. The City of Minneapolis has refused to release pound animals for experimentation since 1986, and in 1989 the Minneapolis City Council passed a resolution to continue the ban. In St. Paul, the Humane Society of Ramsey County does not give or sell animals to research.
Citizens Against Pound Seizure believes it is wrong to use former pets as laboratory tools. These animals should be placed with responsible owners or humanely euthanized.
On May 12, Timberwolves star Christian Laettner’s dog was rescued from a research lab at the University. Chief, a shepherd-husky mix, was picked up by the St. Paul Pound and later sold to the University. Chief was recognized only after a photo of him appeared in a news story. While this story had a happy ending, it is not typical of the fate of most dogs and cats sold to the University. Most people will not have a news story printed about their missing pet or be able to offer a large reward for their pet’s return. As long as the St. Paul Pound continues to sell animals to the University, these beloved companions will go to their deaths - often after enduring lengthy and painful experiments - without ever seeing their families again.
Reprinted courtesy of the Animal Rights Coalition, Inc.
Vegetarian Mascot Battles Texas
DALLAS (Reuter) - “Chris P. Carrot’’, a new mascot that animal rights activists hope will promote vegetarian eating habits, found his first foray into Texas cattle country tougher than expected.
Armed with buttons reading “Meat Stinks’’, the 7-foot-tall orange carrot character was turned away from at least one elementary school while the principal of another warned students not to talk to strangers when he waddled in, animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) said in a news release.
PETA said the carrot would continue its “Eat Your Veggies, Not Your Friends’’ campaign outside school areas if authorities ban him from school grounds.
Among the leaflets Chris P. Carrot is ready to distribute to Texas schoolchildren is one reading “Hamburgers are really cows who have been separated from their families and killed. Bacon and bologna are really little piggies who are taken in crowded, smelly trucks to their death.’’
Two Donkeys Chased, Killed by Thugs in Texas
FORT WORTH, Texas, (Reuter) - Texas police said Thursday they were looking for a gang of thugs who beat two small donkeys to death.
The pet donkeys were killed after beinThank you, women who work II
Thank you, women who work
In this way you make
an indispensable contribution
to the growth of a culture
which unites reason and feeling,
to a model of life ever open
to the sense of “mystery”
Letter to Women, Message of His Holiness POPE JOHN PAUL II, July 10
Thank you, women who work
because you are supposed to be the ones
who rely on superstition, on
faith, more than men
Thank you, women who work
because you need to rely on something,
you’re the inferior sex, remember?
rely on men, or rely on religion
either way, we’ll make you dependent
Thank you, women who work
because that sense of mystery
we attribute to you
is really the sense of hopeless fear
our religion instills on people
who don’t want to think for themselves
and turns people to us
because they have no other choice
Thank you, women who work
with your influence
we can get rid of this whole
reason thing altogether
the bathroom at the Green Mill
you know, I’m so used to
walking into bathrooms at bars
and seeing “I love Scott” and
“I think I love Paul, but I think I love girls”
scribbled on the stalls in ink
but I went into the bathroom at the
Green Mill on the north side of Chicago
which hosts the Uptown Poetry Slam
while a black woman read poetry
about oppression and plantations and slavery
(which sounded more like a speech,
but I won’t get into that)
and I walked into the bathroom, into
a stall, I closed the door, and I saw
some writing, and I thought, oh,
I bet this writing actually has something
to say, I bet there’s poetry up on these walls
and I sat down, and I started to read
and I saw “I love Scott” and
“I think I love Paul, but I think I love girls”
and I started to think that I’d actually
like to meet the people that write these messages
and I’d like to ask them,
“Hey, are you still with Brian? Because
when it said “Jeanie and Brian Forever”
on the bathroom stall at the Green Mill
I wanted to know if it was really true
if I can still believe everything I read
and if there was a happy ending for you”
and then I put my lipstick on in the
bathroom at the Green Mill in Chicago
heard the black woman’s voice resonating
throughout the bar, thought for a moment
about what was on the walls and walked away
The Deep End
love seems so appealing
love is the bottom of the deep end
love is what makes the kiddies
walk to the edge of the diving board
take a deep breath
hold their little noses
and close their eyes
and brace themselves
and jump in
but none of them stay under too long
because they know
even at an early age
when enough is enough
The Last Time
The last time I remember shooting an
animal was with my
son. We were in our back yard, and I saw
a chipmunk moving around off in the
distance. Now, there
are tons of chipmunks and squirrels and
raccoons near our house, the chipmunks
mess everything up,
eat everything in sight, they’re like rats.
So I pulled out my rifle, aimed at that
vermin at the edge
of my property line. Shot it. Killed it.
My son, no more than twelve or thirteen
at the time, was
halfway toward the chipmunk, walking
through the yard. And he just stood there.
When I walked up
to him, he turned around and looked at
me and asked, “Why?” And I had no answer.
I couldn’t give him one.
And that was the last time I shot an animal.
the mistakes he made
I
Ralph
lost three of his fingers
while on the job
at his factory
at the time
medicine couldn’t save
his fingers
after that,
whenever
Ralph
looked at his
fingers,
he thought
of the mistakes
he made
II
Ed
while working with a
circular table saw
reached up
above him
for a piece
of wood
and when the wood
slipped
he cut off
the tips of
two fingers
once at the
hospital
he called
his son
asked him to check
the sawdust-
covered floors
around the
workbench
to see if he could
find them
the doctors tried
to reattach
the tips,
but they
didn’t take
after that,
whenever
Ed
looked at his
fingers,
he thought
of the mistakes
he made
III
Lester Massey
agreed with
a friend
to each chop off
a finger of
the other’s
but after
his friend
chopped off
Lester Massey’s
finger
he changed
his mind
about losing
his own
after that,
whenever
Lester Massey
looked at his
fingers,
he thought
of the mistakes
he made
the one at mardi gras
i was at mardi gras last weekend
and i got a bunch of beads from parades
(no, i didn’t lift my shirt for them) -
and a friend of mine had a balcony
on bourbon street, and so we were on it
on friday night, and the swarms
of people stretched for over a mile. it was
a mob, no one could walk and the crowd
just kind of carried them along. and all
the men expected women to get naked
for them for beads, and from my balcony
i would see every few minutes a series of
flash pops, coupled with a roar from the
crowd, and i knew a woman lifted her shirt
for the screaming masses. i refused, however,
to strip for drunk strangers, when i knew
they all expected me to, being on a balcony
and all. so men would look up at me and stretch
out their arms, looking up inquisitively, as
if to ask either for me to give them beads
or for me to strip. and since i wasn’t stripping
and had plenty of my own beads, i decided
to turn the tables and see if men would accept
the same conditions they asked of these women.
when they looked up at me for something,
i would say, “drop your pants.” they would look up
at me, confused, because the women are the
ones that are supposed to be stripping, but
in general i got two responses from the men:
either they would look at me like i was
crazy and walk away, or they would shrug,
as if to say, “okay,” and then they would
start unzipping their pants. then they would
make a gesture to turn around, as if to ask,
“do you want to see my butt?” and that’s when i’d
yell, “the front,” and then they’d turn back
around, with their pants and their underwear
at their knees, and start moving their hips
(which i never asked for, by the way).
so over the course of the evening i
managed to get at least twenty men to
strip like this for me, and i was amazed
that there was this society, this micro-
cosm of society, that allowed this kind
of debauchery in the streets, a sort of
prostitution-for-plastic-beads form of
capitalism. so i was reveling in this bizarre
annual ritual when this man, average to
everyone else, wearing grey and minding
his own business, decided to look up at me. so
i asked him to drop his pants, and instead of
disgustedly leaving or willingly obliging
he crossed both hands on his chest and looked
up at me, as if to ask, “you want to me do
what? you naughty, naughty girl.” and he
smiled and looked up at me, and it occurred
to me that i finally found someone in this
massive crowd that thinks they way i do.
now, new orleans has a population, from what i
hear, of about one million, but during mardi gras
there are about nine or ten million people, and
all i could think was that of all these people
here, i finally found someone who wouldn’t
blindly do what i asked, but at the same time
wouldn’t think i was crazy for asking.
of course as i looked at him i also happened
to think that he was stunning, by far the best-
looking man i had seen that entire night, he
looked like he had style, like he was self-
confident, but then again, i’m near-sighted
and was on a balcony drunk at mardi gras.
we hit an impasse when he wouldn’t strip
and neither would i, so his attention was
eventually diverted to other balconies. but i
noticed for that next half-hour that he never left
from under my balcony, and every once in a while
he would still turn around and look up at me. oh,
boy, i was thinking the entire time, i know
this is no way to start a relationship, hell,
i’m sure this guy lives nowhere near me, and
i haven’t even had a real conversation with him,
but he’s damn near perfect. and all that time we
were screaming and partying at mardi gras,
he would still occasionally turn around and
make sure i was still there. and finally he
looked at me, signalling that he had to move
on with his friends, and i held up my index
finger to make him wait and then i threw
a bunch of beads at him. part of me threw
them because he was a good sport, putting
up with my taunting and still not giving in,
but a part of me threw them because i
saw in him the strong values and the sense
of self-worth, the sheer love of life, the
desire to be alive, that i possessed all along
and have always longed for in someone else.
the things warren says
I know about this guy,
he sucked his eyeball out
with a shop-vac
he went to the hospital
brought the shop-vac
with him
he was okay, but they
couldn’t put his eve
back in:
it was all mangled, and
besides, it was covered
in potato chips
The Way You Tease Me
What I think I like the most about you
is the way you always leave me wanting more.
When you kiss me, and we start to pull back
I want to cock my head and kiss you again
but I never know if you’ll let me.
What I think I like the most about you
is the way you roll your sultry deep voice over me
like a wave of heat on a summer afternoon.
You use a pause to tease me with your words
until sweat dances down my hairline and tickles me neck.
What I think I like the most about you
is the way you slide your arms around my waist
and make me just want to collapse in your grasp
and run my hands up and down your back
until I hear you moan and sigh.
What I think I like the most about you
is the way that absence makes the heart grow fonder
and when we touch you say we should take it slow,
take our time, enjoy every moment
and you know, you couldn’t be more right.
What I think I like the most about you
are the things that make me think I have to fight for you
are the things that make me second guess myself
because nothing’s ever easy, not you, not me,
not relationships, not sex, not love.
What I think I like the most about you
is the wondering, is the waiting, is the teasing.
That’s what I like. This high-charged guessing game.
The flirting. The first touch. The first everything.
Thinking about the possibilities. Yeah. That’s what I like.
they see independently
Perhaps more than men, women acknowledge
the person, because they see persons
independently of various ideological
or political systems
in their greatness and limitations
they try to go out to them and help them
Letter to Women, Message of His Holiness POPE JOHN PAUL II, July 10
do they see independently from reason, too?
do they see people devoid of ideas, ideologies?
do they help their own murderer?
do they help the people who won’t help themselves?
do they not judge a person then?
do they not value one person differently from another?
what then is love, respect, if it is not earned?
what good are these women really doing
if their help is expected and not earned?
this halloween
this halloween i got a costume together
i wore a black page-boy wig,
a vinyl dress and matching vinyl boots
it was strange for me
i’m not such an outgoing person
and every time i was left alone at a bar
someone would hit on me
usually someone ugly
but i didn’t tell them to leave me alone:
i gave them a fake name, a fake number
and looking back, what made the difference
was not wearing the revealing clothes
but wearing a wig, changing my identity
and it’s not that i’d do it again
but i must admit
i really like being someone else
just for a little while
this is my dilemma
should I go to you
this is my dilemma
should I just
not care anymore
should I just
act the part
should I just
not care anymore
should I just
let you take me
should I just
not care anymore
should I just
kiss you
who cares
suck me in
take me in
who cares
throw me around
it’s okay
I’ve been thrown
around before
I’m used to this
I’m used to this routine:
back and forth,
and then forgetting
forgetting the feelings
forgetting your name
do it to me,
if you want
go ahead
enjoy
feel free
I’ve felt it before
I’ve lived it before
I’ve known it before
I’ve lived it before
and no emotion is new
to me anymore
so should I
this is my dilemma
too much light
too much light makes the baby go blind
and too much light makes the moth
rush into the flame
and die in a final
glorious blaze of glory
and I have seen the light
and I have seen it
what is my choice:
burn in the flame
to burst quickly
to die young
or to slowly slip away
to die slowly
day by day
to let people in darkness
pull me in
inch by inch
until the light
kills me
Two Minutes With Ayn Rand
I don’t believe in things that aren’t proven,
that we have no evidence of, but sometimes,
sometimes, I still think about what I would do
if I had two minutes to talk to you
when someone asked me what I’d say
I said I’d rather hear you speak
I’m sure the words you would part unto me
would mean infinitely more
than what I could say to you
and if I could talk to you
I wouldn’t know what to say
But I know I’d have to tell you
like so many of your fans in the past
that I thank you
for showing me
that there are logical people in the world
that man can live by reason
that reason is a virtue
that selfishness is a virtue
that I have a right to what I earn
to what I create
to what I know to be true
I would have been still searching blindly
for philosophical answers
to the meaning of life
if you never told me
that I am worth something
that I am my own end
and it’s nice to know
that even when I’m surrounded by these
unthinking masses
that there are people who hold their minds
as the highest value
out there somewhere in the world
and the fact that they exist
helps me through my days
but you knew that
you wrote about these heroes
over the years
and how could you manage to write
gripping, thousand-page novels
about heroes that a rational mind
can’t help but love
and did you really find that hero in real life?
Because I’m still looking.
You’ve created these heroes
but are they just created
does anyone else understand
these values as I do?
Yes, thank you
for giving me the answers
I’ve been looking for,
but tell me that someone else out there
found the answers too
so maybe, if those who posed
this unreasonable illogical ethical question
in the first place, if they could give me
another two minutes
so you could do some talking
maybe then you could explain to me
how to get through the days
when no one understands you
how to accept less than perfection
when you’ve seen the purity and the clarity
of the thinking mind
warren stories
i heard this story about this fat woman
who sat naked on a pork chop bone once
and didn’t notice when it lodged itself
among her folds of fat. years later,
when she felt a sharp pain, and the doctors
couldn’t figure out what it was, opened
her up and found the pork chop, and realized
that her skin just eventually grew over it.
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Nick DiSpoldo, Small Press Review (on "Children, Churches and Daddies," April 1997)
Kuypers is the widely-published poet of particular perspectives and not a little existential rage, but she does not impose her personal or artistic agenda on her magazine. CC+D is a provocative potpourri of news stories, poetry, humor, art and the "dirty underwear" of politics.
One piece in this issue is "Crazy," an interview Kuypers conducted with "Madeline," a murderess who was found insane, and is confined to West Virginia's Arronsville Correctional Center. Madeline, whose elevator definitely doesn't go to the top, killed her boyfriend during sex with an ice pick and a chef's knife, far surpassing the butchery of Elena Bobbitt. Madeline, herself covered with blood, sat beside her lover's remains for three days, talking to herself, and that is how the police found her. For effect, Kuypers publishes Madeline's monologue in different-sized type, and the result is something between a sense of Dali's surrealism and Kafka-like craziness.
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Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada
I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer's styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.
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Ed Hamilton, writer
#85 (of children, churches and daddies) turned out well. I really enjoyed the humor section, especially the test score answers. And, the cup-holder story is hilarious. I'm not a big fan of poetry - since much of it is so hard to decipher - but I was impressed by the work here, which tends toward the straightforward and unpretentious.
As for the fiction, the piece by Anderson is quite perceptive: I liked the way the self-deluding situation of the character is gradually, subtly revealed. (Kuypers') story is good too: the way it switches narrative perspective via the letter device is a nice touch.
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Children, Churches and Daddies.
It speaks for itself.
Write to Scars Publications to submit poetry, prose and artwork to Children, Churches and Daddies literary magazine, or to inquire about having your own chapbook, and maybe a few reviews like these.
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Jim Maddocks, GLASGOW, via the Internet
I'll be totally honest, of the material in Issue (either 83 or 86 of Children, Churches and Daddies) the only ones I really took to were Kuypers'. TRYING was so simple but most truths are, aren't they?
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what is veganism?
A vegan (VEE-gun) is someone who does not consume any animal products. While vegetarians avoid flesh foods, vegans don't consume dairy or egg products, as well as animal products in clothing and other sources.
why veganism?
This cruelty-free lifestyle provides many benefits, to animals, the environment and to ourselves. The meat and dairy industry abuses billions of animals. Animal agriculture takes an enormous toll on the land. Consumtion of animal products has been linked to heart disease, colon and breast cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and a host of other conditions.
so what is vegan action?
We can succeed in shifting agriculture away from factory farming, saving millions, or even billions of chickens, cows, pigs, sheep turkeys and other animals from cruelty.
We can free up land to restore to wilderness, pollute less water and air, reduce topsoil reosion, and prevent desertification.
We can improve the health and happiness of millions by preventing numerous occurrences od breast and prostate cancer, osteoporosis, and heart attacks, among other major health problems.
A vegan, cruelty-free lifestyle may be the most important step a person can take towards creatin a more just and compassionate society. Contact us for membership information, t-shirt sales or donations.
vegan action
po box 4353, berkeley, ca 94707-0353
510/704-4444
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C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review (on Children, Churches and Daddies)
cc&d is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist.
"I really like ("Writing Your Name"). It's one of those kind of things where your eye isn't exactly pulled along, but falls effortlessly down the poem.
I liked "knowledge" for its mix of disgust and acceptance. Janet Kuypers does good little movies, by which I mean her stuff provokes moving imagery for me. Color, no dialogue; the voice of the poem is the narrator over the film.
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Children, Churches and Daddies no longer distributes free contributor's copies of issues. In order to receive issues of Children, Churches and Daddies, contact Janet Kuypers at the cc&d e-mail addres. Free electronic subscriptions are available via email. All you need to do is email ccandd@aol.com... and ask to be added to the free cc+d electronic subscription mailing list. And you can still see issues every month at the Children, Churches and Daddies website, located at http://scars.tv
Also, visit our new web sites: the Art Gallery and the Poetry Page.
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Mark Blickley, writer
The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.
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MIT Vegetarian Support Group (VSG)
functions:
* To show the MIT Food Service that there is a large community of vegetarians at MIT (and other health-conscious people) whom they are alienating with current menus, and to give positive suggestions for change.
* To exchange recipes and names of Boston area veg restaurants
* To provide a resource to people seeking communal vegetarian cooking
* To provide an option for vegetarian freshmen
We also have a discussion group for all issues related to vegetarianism, which currently has about 150 members, many of whom are outside the Boston area. The group is focusing more toward outreach and evolving from what it has been in years past. We welcome new members, as well as the opportunity to inform people about the benefits of vegetarianism, to our health, the environment, animal welfare, and a variety of other issues.
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Gary, Editor, The Road Out of Town (on the Children, Churches and Daddies Web Site)
I just checked out the site. It looks great.
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Dusty Dog Reviews: These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding.
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John Sweet, writer (on chapbook designs)
Visuals were awesome. They've got a nice enigmatic quality to them. Front cover reminds me of the Roman sculptures of angels from way back when. Loved the staggered tire lettering, too. Way cool.
(on "Hope Chest in the Attic")
Some excellent writing in "Hope Chest in the Attic." I thought "Children, Churches and Daddies" and "The Room of the Rape" were particularly powerful pieces.
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C Ra McGuirt, Editor, The Penny Dreadful Review: cc&d is obviously a labor of love ... I just have to smile when I go through it. (Janet Kuypers) uses her space and her poets to best effect, and the illos attest to her skill as a graphic artist.
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Cheryl Townsend, Editor, Impetus (on Children, Churches and Daddies)
The new cc&d looks absolutely amazing. It's a wonderful lay-out, looks really professional - all you need is the glossy pages. Truly impressive AND the calendar, too. Can't wait to actually start reading all the stuff inside.. Wanted to just say, it looks good so far!!!
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Dusty Dog Reviews: She opens with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, "Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment." Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers' very personal layering of her poem across the page.
Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA
Indeed, there's a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there's a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.
Mark Blickley, writer
The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing her book.
You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.
Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book or chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers. We're only an e-mail away. Write to us.
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Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies)
I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies') obvious dedication along this line admirable.
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The Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology
The Solar Energy Research & Education Foundation (SEREF), a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., established on Earth Day 1993 the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) as its central project. CREST's three principal projects are to provide:
* on-site training and education workshops on the sustainable development interconnections of energy, economics and environment;
* on-line distance learning/training resources on CREST's SOLSTICE computer, available from 144 countries through email and the Internet;
* on-disc training and educational resources through the use of interactive multimedia applications on CD-ROM computer discs - showcasing current achievements and future opportunities in sustainable energy development.
The CREST staff also does "on the road" presentations, demonstrations, and workshops showcasing its activities and available resources.
For More Information Please Contact: Deborah Anderson
dja@crest.org or (202) 289-0061
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Brian B. Braddock, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies)
I passed on a copy to my brother who is the director of the St. Camillus AIDS programs. We found (Children, Churches and Daddies') obvious dedication along this line admirable.
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Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA
"Hope Chest in the Attic" captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family.
"Chain Smoking" depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. "The room of the rape" is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.
want a review like this? contact scars about getting your own book published.
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Paul Weinman, Writer (on 1996 Children, Churches and Daddies)
Wonderful new direction (Children, Churches and Daddies has) taken - great articles, etc. (especially those on AIDS). Great stories - all sorts of hot info!
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The magazine Children Churches and Daddies is Copyright ©
through
Scars Publications and Design. The rights of the individual pieces remain with the authors. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.
Okay, nilla wafer. Listen up and listen good. How to save your life. Submit, or I'll have to kill you.
Okay, it's this simple: send me published or unpublished poetry, prose or art work (do not send originals), along with a bio, to us - then sit around and wait... Pretty soon you'll hear from the happy people at cc&d that says (a) Your work sucks, or (b) This is fancy crap, and we're gonna print it. It's that simple!
Okay, butt-munch. Tough guy. This is how to win the editors over.
Hope Chest in the Attic is a 200 page, perfect-bound book of 13 years of poetry, prose and art by Janet Kuypers. It's a really classy thing, if you know what I mean. We also have a few extra sopies of the book "Rinse and Repeat", which has all the 1999 issues of cc&d crammed into one book. And you can have either one of these things at just five bucks a pop if you just contact us. It's an offer you can't refuse...
Carlton Press, New York, NY: HOPE CHEST IN THE ATTIC is a collection of well-fashioned, often elegant poems and short prose that deals in many instances, with the most mysterious and awesome of human experiences: love... Janet Kuypers draws from a vast range of experiences and transforms thoughts into lyrical and succinct verse... Recommended as poetic fare that will titillate the palate in its imagery and imaginative creations.
Mark Blickley, writer: The precursor to the magazine title (Children, Churches and Daddies) is very moving. "Scars" is also an excellent prose poem. I never really thought about scars as being a form of nostalgia. But in the poem it also represents courage and warmth. I look forward to finishing the book.
You Have to be Published to be Appreciated.
Do you want to be heard? Contact Children, Churches and Daddies about book and chapbook publishing. These reviews can be yours. Scars Publications, attention J. Kuypers - you can write for yourself or you can write for an audience. It's your call...
Dorrance Publishing Co., Pittsburgh, PA: "Hope Chest in the Attic" captures the complexity of human nature and reveals startling yet profound discernments about the travesties that surge through the course of life. This collection of poetry, prose and artwork reflects sensitivity toward feminist issues concerning abuse, sexism and equality. It also probes the emotional torrent that people may experience as a reaction to the delicate topics of death, love and family. "Chain Smoking" depicts the emotional distress that afflicted a friend while he struggled to clarify his sexual ambiguity. Not only does this thought-provoking profile address the plight that homosexuals face in a homophobic society, it also characterizes the essence of friendship. "The room of the rape" is a passionate representation of the suffering rape victims experience. Vivid descriptions, rich symbolism, and candid expressions paint a shocking portrait of victory over the gripping fear that consumes the soul after a painful exploitation.
Dusty Dog Reviews, CA (on knife): These poems document a very complicated internal response to the feminine side of social existence. And as the book proceeds the poems become increasingly psychologically complex and, ultimately, fascinating and genuinely rewarding.
Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.
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Dusty Dog Reviews (on Without You): She open with a poem of her own devising, which has that wintry atmosphere demonstrated in the movie version of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. The atmosphere of wintry white and cold, gloriously murderous cold, stark raging cold, numbing and brutalizing cold, appears almost as a character who announces to his audience, "Wisdom occurs only after a laboriously magnificent disappointment." Alas, that our Dusty Dog for mat cannot do justice to Ms. Kuypers' very personal layering of her poem across the page.
Children, Churches and Daddies. It speaks for itself.
Debra Purdy Kong, writer, British Columbia, Canada (on Children, Churches and Daddies): I like the magazine a lot. I like the spacious lay-out and the different coloured pages and the variety of writer's styles. Too many literary magazines read as if everyone graduated from the same course. We need to collect more voices like these and send them everywhere.
Fithian Press, Santa Barbara, CA: Indeed, there's a healthy balance here between wit and dark vision, romance and reality, just as there's a good balance between words and graphics. The work shows brave self-exploration, and serves as a reminder of mortality and the fragile beauty of friendship.
Published since 1993
No racist, sexist or homophobic material is appreciated; we do accept work of almost any genre of poetry, prose or artwork, though we shy away from concrete poetry and rhyme for rhyme's sake. Do not send originals. Any work sent to Scars Publications on Macintosh disks, text format, will be given special attention over smail-mail submissions. There is no limit to how much you may submit at a time; previously published work accepted.
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