By Mark Miller

While Americans celebrated the holidays last December, citrus crop and packing house workers in California's southern San Joaquin Valley were visited by the sudden prospect of hunger and homelessness. Night after night, temperatures dropped as low as 20 degrees just as farm workers had begun picking the annual harvest of oranges and lemons. The citrus harvest provides a critical portion of the annual income of farm workers and packing house workers. The devastating freeze destroyed the lemons and almost eliminated the oranges. Only a relative handful of oranges were salvageable, and then only for their juice. Ten thousand workers lost their jobs in Tulare County. Another 3000 in Fresno County were without work. Almost all of them are immigrants from Mexico and Central America. Probably half of them are undocumented workers -- ineligible for public assistance and fearful of openly seeking help of any kind.

Tulare County is the location of [the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization] AFSC's Proyecto Campesino, a program that has served farm workers from its Visalia office for the last 44 years. Proyecto has become a trusted Tulare County stop for farm workers in trouble -- especially the undocumented. Coordinator El Primo Pablo Espinoza and associates Cindy Brito and Graciela Martinez know from the experience of the 1990 freeze that all farm workers, regardless of their legal status, are in immediate trouble. They know that months will pass before the bureaucratic machinery and resources of the state and federal governments can be brought to bear on the farm worker's behalf. Eventually, legal residents and citizen farm workers will become eligible for some assistance -- although some residents will suffer rather than seek help for fear of being perceived as a "public charge" by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and thereby be ineligible for citizenship. The undocumented, however, fear exposure almost as much as hunger and homelessness. The crackdown on immigrants by federal and state legislators over recent years and the passage of state referenda like 187 have criminalized their existence. They know that assistance is almost impossible to receive and dangerous to ask for -- even if the lives of their family members may depend on it.

Courageous people bear this fear. The Rodriguez family, for example, is no stranger to hardship or risks. Roberto and Rosa Rodriguez (not their actual names) are one couple among hundreds who are seeking help from Proyecto Campesino and the AFSC. Back in 1992, they and Rosa's sister arrived in Tulare County from the Mexican State of Michoacan. Like millions of desperate others, they were forced by stark poverty and landlessness to sever ties with their homeland, separate from family and community, and find their way across the border, facing the anguish of leaving their five children, then ages 2,4,8,9, and 10, in the hands of relatives. They established themselves in Tulare County by working hard and eluding the detection of the Border Patrol. They have been able to send financial help home for their children. While here, they have had two more children, now ages 6 and 3. Rosa's sister helps, living in their tiny trailer by day with the children, sleeping in the home of family friends by night.

The freeze left both Roberto and Rosa out of work. There will be no steady work for Roberto until May when the tree pruning season starts. Rosa faces underemployment until August. These facts are devastating. The Rodriguezes have not been able to pay their trailer rent since November, and have been unable to send money back to Mexico. They must seek food handouts and their landlord is also growing desperate.

Roberto and Rosa are seeking work in a county with an unemployment rate that now approaches 30 percent. Although their children may qualify for some assistance, Roberto and Rosa fear exposure. In any case, the two of them are eligible for unemployment insurance, welfare, or food stamps. They have found some piecework salvaging damaged oranges good enough for juice. It means long hours sorting among the ruined fruit which yields them only $24.00 a week. They have come to Proyecto Campesino for help. El Primo says, "You can see the worries on their faces; they speak quietly, very seriously..." If they lose their trailer, they will be forced to rely on other stressed family friends. Landlords will seek more rent from their friends for the extra people in the house.

They tell El Primo that they have sought help from three other agencies. Each time they were told that they were not eligible because of their legal status. In one case, they were told this loudly, with a line of people behind them. This public breach of their carefully hidden legal status worries them. As he has with so many others, El Primo gets on the phone and calls agencies he can trust, arranging for Roberto and Rosa to pick up food at a Catholic shelter. He places two calls to agencies for rent assistance and they agree to see what they can do. The couple leaves, still clearly besieged, but a little relieved and very grateful.

Many, many others will continue to come for help. Many of them will be documented but even they are afraid. The documented fear that their citizenship applications will be in jeopardy if they ask for help. El Primo notes that official welfare and food stamp requests have not risen significantly, despite the fact that food banks and social service agencies are overwhelmed. Anti-immigrant sentiment, exploited by some politicians, has done its work. The people cannot leave. They and their families will suffer. They will not ask for public assistance, even if they or their children are eligible.

The problem is bigger than Proyecto Campesino or the AFSC alone can solve. It is rooted in social problems and injustices that seem insurmountable. At times like this, it seems that the suffering and exploitation of desperate farm workers, those who harvest food in the wealthiest country in the world, will never end. But the sins of despair and inaction come much too easily. It is time to apply all the resources we can and stand again with farm workers.

By WILLIAM BISHOP

It began quite innocently as a simple, elegant expression of faith. And it remained thus until someone more immune to subtlety acquired an even larger fish. But even these people soon found themselves looking at biggger fish yet on the backs of other peoples' cars. This was the beginning of the Great American Pharisee Fish Fry.

It can only be guessed that each proud possessor of a fish believed in his/her heart of hearts that HIS/HERS was the ONE TRUE FISH. Some named their fish Jesus while others named their fish Fish--in the original Greek, of course. Some even named their fish God on the dubious premise that by so sucking up to the Deity a good Christian could be forgiven even this blasphemy. More recently a new species, the Cross-Eyed fish, has been seen swimming around the car pools.

Needless to say, all this fishiness would have been merely a flash in the pan had not a few whimsical souls seen the need to inject some levity into the mix. Hence the Gefilte fish. And the three fishes of the food chain. Now a good Pharisee has never been known for his sense of humor--not 2000 years ago, and certainly not now. The swelling outrage was almost palpable. It needed only one more finely pointed needle: the four-legged fish.

Any wise man would have known that not all challenges need to be answered. But when one's faith (read Honor (read Pride)) has been impugned, wisdom--the lowly handmaiden--is left behind while the Emotions go to the party. Thus it was that too many fish were allowed to rise to the bait.

LIBRARY CAMPAIGN NEEDS YOU!

The campaign to rally support for the June library ballot measure is off and running. In June, Stanislaus County voters will decide whether to renew the eighth of a cent library sales tax to fund libraries in our county. The campaign committee, the Stanislaus Library Trust, needs help from all of us interested in maintaining our revitalized library services. Please act now to offer your financial and other support; send your contribution, as soon as possible, to:

Religious Issues in America series at CSUS: America at war with itself

The origin and expression of ideas that have polarized our conversations about law, education, religion, and politics are the topics for the free public lecture "America at War With Itself" by Dr. James Davidson Hunter at California State University, Stanislaus on Thursday, March 11. The University of Virginia professor's speech is part of the Religious Issues in America Series sponsored by CSUS, the Turlock Chamber of Commerce, and the City of Turlock Task Force. The purpose of the lecture series is to provide a forum for public debate, understanding that one of our goals is to explore our greatest differences as we seek common ground.

ACTION: The lecture is free and open to the public, CSUS Main Dining Hall at 7 pm. For more information, call Dr. Steve Locke, First Presbyterian Church, 632-2324.

By JAMES DAVIDSON HUNTER

Excerpted by Dr. Steve Locke

We Americans would like to imagine ourselves to be somehow above and beyond the possibility of serious civil strife. The very idea of the civil unrest that has torn apart nations like Yugoslavia, Ireland, and Lebanon happening here jolts the mind. Total nonsense, we are inclined to say; we are much too civilized for that sort of thing.

Perhaps so, and perhaps we think this with good reason. I, for one, am disinclined to believe it will happen myself. But then the idea burrows into the mind, suggesting some uncomfortable parallels. Here, as there, nonnegotiable claims about the ordering of public life are in conflict. Here, as there, the claims made are religious in character, if not in substance--they emerge out of our ultimate beliefs and commitments, our most cherished sense of what is right, true, and good. Here, as there, the conflicting claims trace quickly back to competing ideals of community and national identity. Finally here, as there, a culture war with deep historical roots has festered just barely beneath the surface of public life. Our discomfort is not assuaged when an observer like George Kennan tells us that the population has become too large, that pluralism in America has become too intense and the polity too complex for the central government to coherently hold it together; that perhaps the best solution is to divide the nation into semiautonomous republics. Kennan is not alone. The secessionist impulse often seems to be intensifying. Suggestions along these lines may not amount to the balkanization of America, but it comes very close. Perhaps in form this is our postmodern Bosnia after all.

However implausible such speculation may sound to us, surely we are unwise to minimize the significance of the challenges our culture war presents to American democratic life and institutions the challenge is not just the potential volatility of particular controversies. The challenge is internal as well, in the ways the normative ideals that democracy itself depends upon have been weakened. The sociological and political realities of the culture war have a centrifugal effect, fragmenting the very normative framework that would provide a rational and non-coercive way of dealing with the conflict. The "center" can no longer hold; the older faiths--Judeo-Christian and Classical--that once amidst great diversity provided a set of common, if not always coherent, assumptions for the ordering of public life no longer play. And those imagining that we can recreate and reimpose these older "traditional" agreements are simply deluding themselves.

By Physicians for a National Health Program

Economic growth hasn't stopped the number of Americans without health insurance from climbing by 10 million people since 1989, to 43.4 million, according to a study in the American Journal of Public Health.

"By the time Congress finishes with the impeachment debate, another half-million people will have lost their health insurance," according to Dr. David Himmelstein, an author of the study and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard. "Unfortunately, none of them will be members of Congress."

The study, the first comprehensive look at insurance trends in the 1990's, found that the number of uninsured is rising at a rate of over 100,000 people losing coverage every month, despite the nation's strong economic growth -- including more than a 25 percent increase in the Gross National Product and a doubling of the Dow Jones industrial average since 1989.

One in six Americans (16 percent) is now uninsured, up from one in seven (13.6 percent) at the start of the decade.

"Not having health insurance is a major catastrophe for patients -- medically, financially, and emotionally," said Dr. Quentin Young, National Coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program and an internist in Chicago. "It's a silent, devastating epidemic sweeping across the nation."

Among those most affected by the loss of insurance are young adults aged 18-39, Blacks, and Hispanics. From 1989 to 1993 the majority of the increase was among low-income families, but since 1994 middle-income families have been increasingly affected as well.

In several southern and western states (Texas, Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona), nearly one in every four persons is uninsured. However, northeastern states (New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine) had the largest increases in the percentage of their residents without coverage since 1989.

"Incremental reforms have had no impact on the rising number of uninsured," noted Dr. Olveen Carasquillo, co-author of the study and an internist at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

"Two states which have been held up as models of reform -- Oregon and Hawaii -- both have experienced increases. The Kennedy-Kassebaum Insurance Portability Act has helped few people between jobs keep their insurance, and the Children's Health Insurance Plan is not and will not stem the rising tide of uninsurance among children." The number of uninsured children increased from 8.5 million in 1989 to 10.7 million in 1997.

"The tragedy is that this a preventable epidemic. Every other industrialized country, from Denmark to Japan, Canada to Australia, Norway to Germany, England to Taiwan, has a national system of universal coverage," said Dr. Young.

"They aren't perfect, and you may have to wait a few weeks for an MRI, but almost uniformly you can choose your physicians, receive excellent primary and specialty care at the same or higher quality as in the U.S., and the health outcomes are better. It's time for the U.S. to adopt a national health program once and for all."

The study analyzed Census Bureau data from 1989 to 1996. An additional year of data was analyzed by the authors after the article went to press, and is available from PNHP.

Copies of "Going Bare: Trends in Health Insurance Coverage, 1989-1996" by Carasquillo, Himmelstein, Woolhandler, and Bor, American Journal of Public Health, with an additional year of data (1997) and state by state figures available at (312) 554-0382.

Physicians for a National Health Program is an organization of over 8,000 physicians who support universal access to health care.

What is agriculture that promotes social justice?

(Excerpted from Agrarian Advocate, the newsletter of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), Winter 1999 . CAFF is building a movement of rural and urban people to foster family-scale agriculture that cares for the land, sustains local economies, and promotes social justice.)

By TOM HALLER

The problems faced by family farmers are not an unfortunate accident, but the result of an agricultural system that is all too often unfair in how it treats these farmers.

CAFF's interest and involvement in social justice comes not from some abstract ideology. Consider Jake Kirihara, an organic almond grower from Livingston, one of the founding members of CAFF. He and others believed that small farmers did not have an organization to represent their interests. They want CAFF to become a force for leveling the playing field.

Cecil Bonzo, a Stockton area small farmer, was the central figure in the Southeast Asian Farmland Project. This CAFF project provided fields to beginning Southeast Asian farmers who could not get access to land. The goal of the project was to give these farmers a good start until they could secure their own land. Cecil made available some of his own land and served as advisor and teacher to 25 Cambodian and Hmong farmers.

By AMY SIMPSON

Since 1989, Casa de la Dignidad has provided lunch and dinner Tuesday thru Friday for anyone in the community who is hungry. "The program has created friendships and bonds within the community," says Bill Ruth, who is pastor of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church in Livingston.

In addition to meals, the church provides temporary housing. Now Ruth is looking for land where a number of families can farm. The project will provide year-round work for some of the region's 18 percent unemployed. Plans are for volunteers to cultivate their own plots of land and benefit from the harvest. Ruth's vision includes a farmers' market, a local bartering system, and mail order sales of some products. Working with CAFF, Casa de la Dignidad has created three community gardens, one as large as seven acres. A large number of the participants were Hmong from southeast Asia and Mixtecs, indigenous people of Oaxaca, Mexico. Unfortunately, they have now lost that land.

Pastor Ruth's personal vision has guided all his work. After ten years of helping his community, he says he has been given a second chance to make a difference. Now recovering from open-heart surgery, he looks to the future with hope and faith in God. "The hope comes from my soul," he explained, while his motivation is rooted in "encouragement from fellow Christians and support from CAFF."

(Note: for those of you who were at Peace Camp the year, Bill Ruth was our speaker. Remember his dynamic vision and down to earth way of working with all within his community.)

By RUSSELL MOKHIBER and ROBERT WEISSMAN

Need a definition for Washington?

Try institutional insanity.

Consider this: The United States, the world's only remaining military superpower, is about to embark on a military buildup unmatched since the peak of the Reagan-era Cold War.

President Clinton is proposing a boost in the defense budget of $112 billion over six years -- on top of the already monstrous $265 billion of federal money spent annually on the military. The weapons procurement budget alone is scheduled to grow 50 percent in the next half decade. And the Congressional Republicans are set to demand an even greater jump in military spending.

What's happened, you might ask: Was there a coup in Russia? Has the Cold War resumed?

Uh, no. It is not the Empire that's struck again, it's the military-industrial complex.

During the Clinton presidency, the U.S. defense industry -- with encouragement and subsidies from the Pentagon -- has undergone an ear-splitting consolidation that has left but three major contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon. Today's Lockheed Martin is the product of the merger of Lockheed, Martin Marietta, Loral and parts of General Dynamics. Boeing leaped to the top tier of the contractor pack with its acquisition of McDonnell Douglas. Raytheon gobbled up Hughes.

With manufacturing facilities spread across the United States, these three companies now have enormous political influence -- they can promise that new military contracts will mean jobs in the districts of hundreds of members of Congress, and in nearly every state. They supplement this structural power with huge campaign contributions -- more than $8.5 million in the 1997-1998 electoral cycle, according to the Center for Responsive politics -- and even bigger lobbying investments -- nearly $50 million in 1997 alone, according to the Center. To complete the package, the industry invests in a variety of hawkish policy institutes and front groups, all of which churn reports, issue alerts, factsheets, congressional testimony and op-eds on the critical need for more, and more, and more defense spending.

Combined with the powerful lobby from the Pentagon and its chicken-little worries about shortcomings in U.S. military "readiness" and the ability of the United States to fight two major wars simultaneously, the defense contractors have successfully positioned themselves to reap the benefits of a new explosion in military spending.

As William Hartung of the World Policy Institute notes in a new report, "Military Industrial Complex Revisited," nothing indicates the power of the contractor lobby more than its ability to extract more money from Congress for weapons purchases than the Pentagon itself has requested.

Hartung highlights the example of the C-130 transport plane, which is made by Lockheed Martin just outside of the congressional district of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. In the last 20 years, the U.S. Air Force has asked for five C-130s, but Congress has funded 256. "This ratio of 50 planes purchased for every one requested by the Pentagon may well be a record in the annals of pork barrel politics," Hartung writes. The C-130s go for about $75 million a piece.

Even more remarkable, perhaps, is the "Star Wars" program. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the program's original mission no longer exists. Although the Pentagon has poured $55 billion into the program in a decade and a half, as Hartung notes, it has been a miserable failure in technical terms. Undeterred, the Congressional leadership added an extra $1 billion in Star Wars funding in the 1999 federal budget. Chalk up another victory for Lockheed and Boeing.

But nothing compares to the bonanza that the defense sector is about to reap. Without even the bogeyman of a perceived Soviet threat and in a time of rigid adherence to budget austerity, the weapons makers and their allies are about to usher in a new era of military profligacy and industrial waste.

With the U.S. infrastructure crumbling, its Medicare system imperiled, child poverty at unconscionable levels in a time of unparalleled economic expansion and global warming threatening the well-being of the entire planet, a remotely sensible version of "national security" would prioritize these concerns over maintaining the military budget at current levels, let alone increasing it.

Unfortunately, the lobbies for public works, the sick and aged, the poor and the environment cannot match the influence of the weapons makers. Their urgings that the federal government invest to address real problems that trouble the entire society, or at least large segments of it, are dismissed as "unreasonable."

In Washington, where things are upside down, it is the madmen in the Pentagon and at Lockheed Martin who are considered reasonable.

Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor.

© Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman (russell@essential.org or rob@essential.org).

Convocation of the alternatives now!

Making connections between & across movements in northern California

You are invited: Grassroots, issue & political party activists; Community & coalition organizers, outraged persons!

Whether you're involved in the struggles to achieve electoral reform or multiracial justice; to defend gay rights; to oppose the prison-industrial complex; to secure the environment; to counter economic globalization; to support the alternative economy, including alternatives to corporate health care and corporate agribusiness, none of us can hope to succeed unless all of us come together to forge a broad-based movement. Statewide initiatives and public education campaigns are some of the forms the new movement can take. Come share your ideas for building the movement that will take us to victory.

KPFA radio host Larry Bensky will facilitate the morning discussion.

Location: Friends Meeting House, San Francisco (65 9th Street, south of Market)
Date: Saturday, March 27, 1999 Time: 9:30 am - Evening
Objective: Develop a concrete action agenda for 1999 - 2000 Facilitation: KPFA Host Larry Bensky & others. Host Organization: Alliance for Democracy

ACTION: 916-489-2098 Child care: Please phone if you need it. Food: Bring your own bag lunch or visit restaurants nearby Accommodation: Motels within walking distance of convocation site Convocation Cost: Free.

By ELIZABETH ANN VENCILL

Father Lonanchan W. Arouje, Pastor Wade Estes, Dr. Joseph L. Slade, and Rabbi Leah Kurtz Sudran made up the distinguished panel of guests at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration on Friday the 15th of January at CSU Stanislaus. Orage Quarles, III, publisher of the Modesto Bee, moderated questions, Dr. Walter Strong gave a welcome and introduction, and Dr. Marvalene Hughes made remarks. A delicious buffet luncheon was served. Music offerings came from Ms. Gwen Amey, the Hilmar High School Choir and Hilmar High School Orchestra.

Father Arouje paralleled King to Ghandi, and said that their philosophies were similar. Gandhi, he indicated, was influenced by the Sermon on the Mount and King is referred to as the Ghandi of Civil Rights.

Dr. Slade referred to King as a giant, and said that the dream is being fulfilled but hasn't filled up yet, because social ills and injustices still exist. Slade occupies a place on the California Youth Authority Board and lamented of so many minority individuals being incarcerated. Slade reminded, "We are our brother's keepers."

Rabbi Sudran emphasized that when "Martin Luther King died, we lost a dream." "As a Jew," she lamented, "I mourned his passing, for as long as he was alive, I had the dream of bringing a coalition of African-Americans and Jews together." Sudran reminded listeners that two-thirds of the white Freedom Riders in the Selma, Alabama, were Jews. Sudran marched in Selma, and spoke of the feeling that her "feet were praying." She said there is a need to stand together against poverty, violence and the lack of hope.

Reverend Estes pointed out that "every generation has a prophet who talks truth," and that King served that calling. According to Estes, King touched every establishment, for King "proclaimed truth in love regardless of the consequences."

WAR DUST

Rigid attention
Was spent
Perusing the arsenal
Late uncovered
Just last night.

A last hope

To men
Forsaken by their youth,
Damned to wondering
From era to era
Mercenaries taunted
By the memories
Within their loins.

Brought to reality
By the sooty leavings
Of war-torn lives,
Seeking always
And only
To unearth the divine.

Backwater: Central Valley Dreamscapes: photo exhibit by Roman Loranc

Until March 15, photos by Modesto's Roman Loranc will be exhibited by the Ansel Adams Gallery in Pebble Beach. Loranc's exquisite handcrafted black and white prints are in an exhibit entitled Backwater: Central Valley Dreamscapes.

Readers of Stanislaus Connections should be familiar with Loranc's photos as he has frequently provided illustrations over the years.

Roman Loranc was born in Bielsko-Biala, Poland, in 1956 and emigrated to the United States in 1981. Since settling in California's Great Central Valley, Loranc has increasingly turned to subjects in his backyard: the delicate wetlands shadowing the Pacific Flyway, the stirring and primeval contours of the Diablo Range, and the sinuous and radiant surfaces of once mighty Central Valley rivers. His work marks a return to classic landscape photography as intimate encounter with land and psyche.

Loranc and his wife, Modesto Junior College instructor, writer, and poet Lillian Vallee are currently collaborating on a book entitled Hardworking Rivers: The Streams and Wetlands of the San Joaquin Valley.

The pair aim to educate the public to the singularity and fragility of Central Valley rivers and wetlands, to highlight the cooperative efforts of citizens and various public agencies in acquiring and restoring lands critical to the survival of migratory and resident wildfowl and songbirds, and to express the aching beauty surrounding the San Joaquin Valley.

ACTION: The Ansel Adams Gallery, located at the Inn at Spanish Bay, 2700 Seventeen Mile Drive, is open everyday, 9 am to 6 pm., 375-7215.

By JOSHUA POLLARD

Recently I attended a lecture at Modesto Junior College by Dr. Leonard Shlain, author of the controversial new book, The Alphabet Versus The Goddess- The Conflict Between Word And Image.

The premise of the book is best stated in his preface: "I hypothesized that when a critical mass of people within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemispherical modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones, which manifests as a decline in the status of images, women's rights, and goddess worship."

My colleague, Jennifer Fergison, a women's studies major, and I were looking the book over at work before the lecture. She became so enraged that she decided not to go. She was not impressed by sweeping theories of mass misogyny due to the advent of literacy.

In the chapter "Muslim Veils/Muslim Words," he says, "Some anthropologists claim that the custom of female genital mutilation predated Islam.... The available evidence suggests that female genital mutilation is relatively a recent practice. With the exception of a few isolated pockets, this practice has made its appearance primarily in societies in which males learned to read the Koran, even though there is nothing in the Koran that justifies it."

Or in the chapter "Mystic/Scholastic," he writes about Thomas Aquinas, "Since Thomas was in love with the mystery of his religion, one would have expected him to appreciate women's way of knowing. But his ever-present companions--his quill, inkpot, and alphabet--most likely tricked his left brain and right hand into leaving uncomposed anything that spoke well of 50 percent of the globe's population."

That evening, by myself, I went to a packed Forum Room 110 . Very charismatic and witty, Dr. Shlain was visibly pleasing the crowd. He brought a lot of interesting details about events of men's and women's relationships through history; matriarchal vs. patriarchal. One problem -- I did not hear one solid piece of evidence that literacy had anything to do with it. He even associated foot-binding of women in China to that country's acquisition of the printing press.

Every chauvinistic goddess destroying event in history is tied to more men reading and writing. His thesis is that with TV and the computer, the image is back and hence comes the Feminist Movement on the rise and an egalitarian society -- 'image based society means altruism.'

The girl next to me leaned over and asked, "Are you buying this?" When I said, "No," she smiled and said, "Good, I thought I was the only one."

After it was over, she expressed a distaste for the lack of answers to the questions that were asked after his presentation, and felt he never made his point clear. When I asked him why he thought learning to read and write had more of an influence than, for instance, Aristotle's view of women influencing an Aristotle-loving Thomas Aquinas, he just brushed off the question and moved on.

I believe he is sincere and has put a lot of effort in his research. It is always good to see new theories challenging old paradigms. It is better when they proven valid.

The author is a student at Modesto Junior College.

Yokuts' slide show features intrepid cyclist

Beginning and ending in Modesto, former Yokuts Chair Don McMillan cycled from sea (the Pacific) to shining Gulf (of Mexico) in the summer of '97. The solo tour lasted from June 9 to August 15 and logged over 4600 miles with uncounted flat tires. "I've been lucky," says McMillan. "This was my third bicycle tour of a lifetime." He notes that, though this tour was his third longest, neither of his longer adventures took him clear from sea water on one side of the Great Divide to sea water on the other.

Fish and Asparagus Rolls

I used to fix this recipe quite often and decided to dig it out of the back of the recipe box. It's also timely because of the asparagus season. The original recipe recommends serving a lemon/hollandaise sauce over the fish, but in the name of nutrition, I've omitted this. Enjoy!

Fish and Asparagus Rolls

8 fresh or frozen sole, flounder or other fish fillets (2 pounds)
1 1/2 pounds fresh asparagus
1/4 cup butter or margarine, melted
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon peel
1 teaspoon snipped fresh dill or 1/2 teaspoon dried dillweed
1/2 teaspoon salt

Thaw fish, if frozen. Cut fresh asparagus into 6-inch lengths. In saucepan cook fresh asparagus, covered, in small amount of boiling salted water for 8 to 10 minutes. Drain.

Place three or four asparagus spears crosswise atop each fillet; roll up fillets and secure with wooden picks. Place fish rolls, seam side down, in a 9X13 baking dish. Combine melted butter or margarine, the lemon peel, dill and salt; brush fish with butter mixture. Bake, uncovered in a 350¡ oven for 20 to 25 minutes. Remove rolls to platter; remove picks. Serves 8.

By NANCY DIMOND

Re: the February recipe. My family has been making the Three-layer chocolate cookies for so long, I had forgotten that the bottom layer contains a raw egg. Given the more recent concern about salmonella in raw eggs I would suggest these alternatives for the crust:

1) use 1/4 cup EggBeaters in place of the raw egg or