LIVING LIGHTLY:

Mud Pies and Purple Onions

Recipe:  Flavor of the Valley

DIALOGUE: LETTERS

By MYRTLE OSNER

More than a few people have wondered why drug addicts are filling our jails and prisons where no treatment exists for addiction. More and more counties are finding an alternative, however limited, to jailing addicts. It's cost effective as well as rehabilitative. Stanislaus County is one of the first to implement Drug Court, with Judge Donald Shaver in charge.

Created in 1995, Drug Court is a team effort comprised of the judge, the District Attorney, the Public Defender, and a substance abuse counselor. Only addicts who have not been in state prison are eligible. More serious felons are not eligible.

Treatment begins when the addict accepts the program of rehabilitation. Often a person has been arrested for some other offense than drug addiction. Many addicts have said they were "rescued" when arrested. Clients go into the rehab program before serving a sentence and spending months in jail.

The key difference is in recognizing addiction as an illness rather than a criminal offense. Punishment in jail doesn't cure disease, treatment does. The old method of serving a sentence first only prolongs addiction.

When asked why we don't de-criminalize drug addiction, Judge Shaver replied that being arrested forces the addict into treatment that he/she is incapable of taking voluntarily. Strict monitoring is enforced and all the team members with the judge participate in the rehab.

The first drug court in Stanislaus County was started for pregnant women. Their babies, if born addicted to the mother's drug of choice, can cost us a quarter of a million dollars a year. Not all babies can be saved, but some are. The program now includes both men and women and a juvenile drug court is starting.

Does drug court make fiscal sense? Emphatically yes, says Judge Shaver. Keeping people in jail at $86 a day compared to $8 a day for a year in treatment makes the program very cost efficient. He says a year is the minimum, some take longer. Jail beds can then be used for more serious offenders.

Does drug court keep addicts out of the criminal justice system? Typically there is a 50 per cent recidivism rate for addicts in California jails. In the three years since Stanislaus County has had Drug Court, the rate of recidivism has been 4 per cent for those people finishing the program. The time frame is of course not long enough to judge the future, but it is truly remarkable if it continues to be successful.

Habitat House needs workers!

Habitat For Humanity, Stanislaus, is building a house on Dan West Ct., just off of the 2300 block of Woodland Ave. near Rosemore, in Modesto, across from the Modesto Church of the Brethren.

HFHS needs people of ALL SKILL LEVELS, including yours, to help build it.

Refreshments are continuously needed as well.

Work commences daily at 8 am and ends around noon, except Sundays and Mondays.

ACTION: Come out and work a few hours for a worthy cause! If you can help, call Ruth Sesser at 521-4935 or Loren Johnson, 527-5506.

By SARA MARTIN

Senior, Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado

May 23, 1999

During World War II, with threats of disastrous bombings, the people of Cambridge, England, set out to preserve the exquisite stained-glass windows of the King's College Chapel.

The people rallied together and took apart the windows and numbered each piece. Then, families took the fragments and hid them within their homes. They tucked them away in sugar bowls and sock drawers. The chapel made it through the war unharmed, but visible still between the replaced fragments of the windows are the lines where the pieces were broken and then put back together.

Maybe the beauty now revealed in the light is that an entire community came together and restored the vision. Though flawed, I believe, it is stronger than ever.

In a way, each and every one of us is a piece of a Columbine community stained glass through which the sun shines bright and against which the wind blows cold. The piece we carry into our homes is made up of elements given to us by the literature which we read, the great teachers we learn from and the models we observe. It is a vision within us of which the totality is unknown until we die.

And in some ways our piece of the greater window is a stained window in itself made up of pieces from our own experiences. Our window is not unlike the first window of the Annunciation within the Chapel; it is made of pieces of glass given to us like messages to a child. It is our responsibility to accept those pieces. If we cherish them, we begin to create the pictures of our window and determine the colors and their hue.

For me, the Iliad combined with the Odyssey, as an examination of human civilization, is painted in a rich medieval blue, somewhere on my own window. Alongside it, decorated in deep, fragrant yellows and greens, are John Steinbeck's great works of literature: Of Mice and Men and Cannery Row - stories of simple human beings achieving great acts of love.

For all of us here, our teachers are often the greatest givers of the glass. For example, Mr. Sneddon and his vision for his students, which extends beyond the curriculum of earth science but encompasses life lessons. Skills he considers valuable that I now consider priceless! These are gifts if you open your heart. There's also Mrs. Sampson, who met a ram at the stock show with spiritual eyes and sees books as a thicket which one must subdue. I've never been a poet but with her guidance I've learned to live the poetry. Mr. Tonelli and his overflowing love and support for every single student who walks into his classroom; Mr. Andres, senior and junior, who have brought dedication to a Columbine tradition of music and have provided me with a personal melody for my past four years; and Mrs. Jankowski and the quilts we made in journalism just so she'd have a square of cloth to remember us by.

These are pieces that make up my window, which adds to the overall window of our Columbine community.

The models in my life: my mom as a teacher and Paula Reed as a coach and an encourager have added greatly to the colors that enhance my glass. I watch these women who bring grace and beauty to motherhood and I take those pieces and I hold on to them.

It is our job to hear the message and recognize the pieces. We are created by the choices we make. Our window can be vibrant in color and spirit, a collection of the gifts given to us by the people who surround us. Or our window can be blurred and colorless. We must recognize the pieces, hear the message and create the window within us.

Because of what occurred on April 20, I am beginning to see what my personal window must reflect in order to fit into the larger window. I must live life with a concentrated purpose and a dedication to each moment. I must remember our friends who lost their lives, especially my friend Cassie Bernall. And as I wish that I had had more time, and more opportunities to tell her what she meant to me, I must remember what I have learned: to love deeply and appreciate every word and every gesture of each person I love or will love. So, now, we are being called upon particularly at this time to restore the vision - to take our numbered pieces and rebuild the window of our community. And though we have faced disasters of our own and our window may appear to have been shattered, we can achieve a greater beauty as we put the pieces back together again. Let the light shine through the stained glass, colored by this last four years, by these last four weeks. Like the people of Cambridge, let us recognize what is worthy to be saved, to be restored, and in unity rebuild the Columbine window from which others may draw their inspiration.

Source: http://www.distributionconcepts.com/grad.htm

Visit the Littleton Memorial website at: http://www.distributionconcepts.com/grad.htm

FOOD group seeks fundraisers

Future Options On Development is seeking professional fund raisers. The person or team is expected to generate funds and personnel for the purpose of promoting and winning the November 2000 FOOD Initiative ballots in Stanislaus County and it’s cities. The fund raisers will report directly to the FOOD Campaign Manager and the Board of Directors, The FOOD Group.

Compensation is negotiable but based on performance. Good character and high ethical standards are a must. Preference will be given to Stanislaus County residents. The positions are available September 1999 through election day November 7, 2000.

Interested persons may call or write to a FOOD representative. 526-5821

By NANCY DIMOND

It’s been five years since I first came to the Valley. The first weekend I was here I attended one of the first International Festivals in Modesto. Since then I’ve come to really appreciate the cultural diversity of the Valley. Sometimes it’s mind-boggling how many cultures we have coexisting here. So as I’m leaving Modesto I think it’s only fitting that you get a recipe with an ethnic flavor. Some friends of ours brought this salad over with egg rolls for a "new baby" meal. We loved the salad and it’s fairly easy to make.

Scattered Sushi Rice Salad
2 cups uncooked white rice
2 1/2 cups water
2 tablespoons mirin
6 tablespoons rice vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 egg
another splash of mirin
2 medium carrots, finely diced
1 small cucumber, peeled, seeded, finely diced
2 green onions, sliced thin (whites and greens)
1 cup snow peas, cut in 1/2 diagonals
1 small yellow squash, finely diced
3-4 tablespoons minced sushi ginger
3-4 tablespoons sesame seeds

VISTA positions at Iowa Peace Institute

AmeriCorps*VISTA: Positions Available

The Iowa Peace Institute in Grinnell seeks applicants to fill four VISTA Member positions. Two of the Members will be assigned to develop the Restorative Justice Project to serve victims and offenders in Ottumwa and Burlington. The remaining Members will be assigned to the Peaceable Schools Project working directly with students, educators, parents, and conflict resolution specialists across Iowa to address the issue of violence and potential violence in schools.

VISTA stands for Volunteers In Service To America. The program assigns skilled volunteers to a community to form partnerships with residents and pursue activities or projects that will improve the quality of community life. Special emphasis is given to working in low-income communities.

VISTA Members receive a monthly stipend (either $697 or $661 depending on location) to cover living expenses and, at the end of a commitment period, can receive a cash bonus of $1200 or a voucher for $4725 to be applied toward past or future academic tuition and related fees. VISTA Members may not hold another job but may be able to enroll in one class per semester during the commitment period.

THE PEACEABLE SCHOOLS PROJECT is aimed at preventing school violence and creating peaceable schools by promoting appropriate dispute resolution options that teach Iowa students, educators and parents conflict resolution skills that can be applied to all aspects of life.

THE RESTORATIVE JUSTICE PROJECT is aimed at reducing crime and increasing offender accountability and responsibility by developing a restorative justice program comprising community volunteers to work directly with victims, offenders, their communities and Iowa correctional services personnel.

Contact: Chris D. Baker, M.A., Director of Conflict Management Programs, Iowa Peace Institute, 917 10th Ave., P.O. Box 480, Grinnell, IA 50112, (515) 236-4880, Fax:(515) 236-6905, email: cdbaker@netins.net, Web: www.iapeace.org, www.americorps.org

By WILLIAM BISHOP

The numeral zero: "the origin of zero is unknown, and no record exists of its history before AD 400." ENCARTA, on-line.

As I was growing up, a common populist expression had it that "50,000 Frenchmen can’t be wrong." Were you to arrive at a consensus among a similar number of Americans today, you could take it to the bank that it was wrong.

The problem, of course, lies with what currently passes for the "populist tradition" in America. Today, this tradition permits people with no training, education or native talent to lay claim to "deep thoughts" without breaking a sweat. More than ever, populism has become the National Sacred Tradition for the ill-educated, the intellectually slothful, scoundrels, politicians and HMOs. Not to be redundant.

Populism today seeks to render a "simple" solution to whatever issue might be at hand. Its simple strokes can be seen downtown at the doctor’s office, or in Washington, DC, directing the national debate.

HMOs are themselves a product of the new populism—it would be foolish to expect to not find it there.

Doctors and scientists await the arrival of their worst nightmare—a broad-spectrum drug resistant strain of bacteria—at a hospital or clinic near you, a drug-resistance brought on by indiscriminate misuse of antibiotics. Meanwhile, the simple populism which spawned HMOs is incapable of recognizing a connection between contributing to this threat and the cost-containing policy of handing out free antibiotics instead of calling for a laboratory test to determine whether antibiotics are appropriate. This is not simple enough for populism. A nurse-wannabe at our local health care organization gave my wife (a medical technologist with a background in microbiology) some antibiotics for her bronchitis. My wife explained that if her cough was due to a viral infection, an antibiotic would not phase it; so why should she be needlessly popping a pill? The response was pure populism: "But how will you know the antibiotic won’t work if you won’t take it?" The populist argument here has been reduced to its simplest common denominator: no further discussion will be brooked, much less comprehended.

Simplicity is more than just the essence of the new populist doctrine. Once you have attained populist simplicity, you have attained Nirvana! Populist simplicity renders the response THE correct response in spite of any attempt to point out any internal inconsistencies in the answer. Once simplicity as been ascertained, any attempt to introduce inconsistency is merely an unnecessary complication. Who needs it?

People who are supposedly intelligent are guilty of the new populist sloth. Recently a member of MENSA gushed in print about how there are only "eleven more months until the new millennium!" The new millennium is the perfect symbol of our new populism. And an excellent opportunity to drive populist friends around the bend trying to justify their stupidity:

1. Ask a populist how to count to ten. Any populist worth his salt will start "one, two, three, …, nine, ten." That’s how we are all taught to count.

2. Explain to the populist that to count properly, he should start "zero, one, two, …etc." Persuade the populist to explain how everyone may have a #10 finger, but that no one has a #0 finger. Etc.

3. Ask the populist to disagree with the fact that if there are ten years to a decade, and if you start counting at year one, then the decade will not be done until you are done with the tenth year.

4. Ask the populist to explain how declaring a decade done after 9 years is not short-changing the decade by 10%.

5. Now, since the number zero did not appear in the literature until after AD 400, clearly if Jesus Christ were born in the year zero, this birth would have occurred within the past 1600 years, which is no where near a millennial mark.

6. And if, on the other hand, (and by common convention – I have no argument here) Jesus Christ’s birth were set at the year 1, then calling the millennium done after 999 years is cheating. Or maybe its just a matter of populists not being able to count.

Anyway, now that the populist simplicity has done away with the need for factuality, or anything resembling it, it is not the time to look for any more presidential candidates of actual merit. The truly first-string potential candidates have been sitting on the sidelines for the past several elections now—and after Clinton/Starr, we will see the second-rate potential candidates sitting out the elections alongside the first stringers.

All of which brings me to the point of this whole exercise, which is to predict that Dan Quayle may yet be elected as the Man for the New Millenium! I can’t think of anyone more deserving.

Folksinger David Roth to perform in Modesto

"A powerful new singer-songwriter has reached our hearts. With voices like David’s still singing, there’s a certainty that the candle will remain lit, the hope reasserted, and the dream still sung..."

— Peter Yarrow (Peter, Paul, and Mary)

Making his first concert appearance in Modesto, singer/songwriter David Roth will perform at the Church of the Bretheren, 2301 Woodland Ave., Saturday, September 11th, at 7:30 PM. Tickets are $6 advance/$8 at the door.

A secular artist, Roth blends a dash of Dan Fogelberg, a pinch of David Letterman, a whoosh of Will Rogers, and a touch of James Taylor-meets-Jerry Seinfeld in his highly original, sometimes hilarious and always thought-provoking music. Roth writes songs with peace and justice themes.

Roth was a Kerrville New Folk award winner in 1986, top vote-getter at the Falcon Ridge, NY, Folk Festival’s "Most Wanted Showcase" in 1996, and a NAIRD INDIE nominee for singer/songwriter album of the year, 1994. The Chicago native, and two-time national anthem singer for the NBA’s Bulls, has often been cited for his music. In addition to singing "Earth" at the 40th Anniversary of the United Nations, he sang his "Rising in Love" at the 100th Anniversary of Carnegie Hall in 1991.

"Manuel Garcia," based on the true story of one man’s battle with cancer, appears in the best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul. The book, Chicken Soup for the Kid’s Soul will include Roth’s "Nine Gold Medals" as one of 101 pieces selected from nearly 8,000 submissions. Writer of "May the Light of Love", Roth’s work also appears in Barbara Glanz’s McGraw-Hill business best-seller Care Packages for the Workplace and will be included in her next book as well.

"David writes and sings songs with a devastating combination of heartfelt wisdom and incisive wit. In my eyes he sets a new ‘singer-songwriter’ standard for the rest of us to aspire to, and it’s a standard that’s very, very high." — Christine Lavin

ACTION: Call 209-522-7865 for tickets and information. Visit David Roth’s website: http://songs.com/folkera/dr

By NORMAN SOLOMON

Creators Syndicate

Across the country, PBS stations are in denial. And if we think the programming they provide is worthy of the name "public television," then maybe we’re in denial, too.

Targeting an upscale audience, elaborate commercials are now routine on PBS — but we’re supposed to look at them as "enhanced underwriter credits."

Every weeknight, the crown jewel of PBS public affairs — "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" — reaches several million American homes. The hour-long show is probably the most influential news broadcast in the United States. Sustained by big bucks from conglomerates in such industries as agribusiness and insurance, the program rarely strays from conventional media wisdom. But we’re supposed to view it as an excellent source of journalism.

Over the years, "public TV" has morphed into privatized television. These days, PBS depends on funding from private firms and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. By now, only a veneer of public service remains, shiny and thin.

With hundreds of PBS stations walking like ducks, talking like ducks and quacking like ducks, we’d be ill-advised to believe that they’re really fascinating aardvarks.

It didn’t have to be this way. During the 1960s, a lot of noncommercial channels went on the air, under the moniker of "educational television." The offerings were apt to be poorly produced and rather boring, but the potential was apparent. After all, some public space was being carved out of the commercialized TV terrain already known as "a vast wasteland."

Gradually, money poured in and viewership climbed. More and more, programs on PBS were similar to shows on avowedly commercial cable networks. Today, each PBS affiliate is little more than another cable option — mocking the dream that public TV could exist in fact as well as in name.

Seven years ago, professor William Hoynes of Vassar College took an in-depth look at the content of public affairs shows on PBS stations. He found that those programs were heavily reliant on a narrow range of sources from government and the business sector.

Now, analyzing data from 75 separate programs during a two-week period in late 1998, Hoynes has assessed recent trends. It turns out that in the media world of PBS stations, things aren’t as bad as they used to be. They’re worse.

Adhering to an "insider orientation" is standard operating procedure on PBS. Instead of "wide-ranging discussions and debates," Hoynes says, "public television provides programs that are populated by the standard set of elite news sources."

The 1992 study and the latest one, both released by my associates at the media watch group FAIR, present a grim and grimmer picture of the Public Broadcasting Service. While corporate voices and business programs are all over PBS, the general public is scarcely visible on a day-to-day basis.

For instance, the new study discovered:

* "More than one-third of all on-camera sources — 36.3 percent — during the two weeks studied were representatives of corporate America or Wall Street. This almost doubled the percentage found in the 1992 study."

* In sharp contrast, Americans in the broadly defined category of "citizen activists" get scant representation on PBS, accounting for only 4.5 percent of total sources. "For example, there is no regular labor voice in discussions of the economy and no regular consumer perspective in debates about anti-trust policy." Overall, citizen activists "appear with such relative infrequency...that they cannot help but be marginal, if intriguing, participants in the public discourse."

* The study found that only 5.7 percent of the total sources on PBS were members of the general public — down from 12 percent in 1992.

"This study reveals public TV’s programming to be little different in substance than that on commercial TV," says Janine Jackson, program director at FAIR. Her assessment is right on target: "In survival mode for so long fending off conservative attacks, public television seems to have forgotten its original mission to `help us see America whole, in all its diversity’ and to be `a forum for controversy and debate.’"

The entire new study — The Cost of Survival: Political Discourse and the `New PBS’— is on FAIR’s web site (www.fair.org) along with supporting data.

Meanwhile, as we begin the second half of 1999, few things seem as predictable as PBS, the public TV service that quacks like a duck and claims to be a soaring eagle.

By MYRTLE OSNER

This summer, I visited Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I went to an Elderhostel and visited friends and relatives, but I also kept my eyes open for parallels and lessons that I might learn with my interests in land use patterns and gardening.

Both cities have populations over 800,000, with immigrants coming daily. Alberta lies directly north of Montana and is an extension of the great prairies that once existed in the United States. Flying in, the land beneath is a quilt of yellow and greens. The yellow is canola and the greens may be wheat, alfalfa, open land, or the winding deep green of river banks and trees. Canola is Alberta's "Cinderella" crop, because of the low cholesterol properties of its oil, and shares cash crop billing with cattle.

Calgary is reputed to cover the largest geographical area in North America. The Nose Hill overlook is breathtaking. The city core seems far away. High rises poking into the sky cluster on the banks of the Bow River, ribboning its way through the prairie from Banff and the Rockies. Subdivisions eat their way along the hillsides in Calgary, often separated by miles of uncultivated land, all of which is in the city limits. It's 17 miles as the crow flies from downtown to the northwest border.

The rolling hills are glacial till left by ice ages about 10,000 years ago. In July those hills and valleys are clothed with green prairie grasses and wildflowers. Trees live only in the river bottom land.

Calgary has preserved its open spaces with numerous city parks. The Bow and Elbow Rivers are green corridors with plenty of public access. The city has a world class zoo and botanical gardens. The ski jumps and ice rinks stand as legacy of the 1988 Olympics.

Gardening is a passion with many people and is intensely practiced for the four months the sun shines and snow is melted. Wonderful private and public gardens, as well as trips to see mountain flowers, were opened to my Elderhostel group.

Calgary and Edmonton have excellent public transportation systems. Edmonton, in contrast to Calgary, is compact. It has some of the same amenities: bicycle paths along the rivers and lovely parks.

In Edmonton I attended the International Festival highlighting the foods and cultures of 50 ethnic groups. It was exciting to hear so many languages spoken as we walked through the displays. Immigrants seem more recent than here and seem to get along with little tension. How I wish we could do an event of this kind here!

What fuels this explosive growth in a land we think of as too cold and too harsh? Northern Alberta has oil and coal and it's boom or bust economy is dependent on oil revenues.

California's Central Valley has as big a land mass as Alberta. The difference is our wonderful climate and deep soils instead of glacial till. Will we squander it?

Newlyweds spend first year studying world-wide environment

(Editor’s note: Tirza Hollenhorst and Chris Johnson have environmental fellowships in Egypt, Ecuador, Thailand and New Zealand. Connections hopes to print updates.)

While growing up in Modesto, Stanislaus Connections had a real influence on the formation of my environmental ethic . I am taking a year off from my studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas to travel and conduct environmental research with my new husband Chris, a recent Rice graduate.

We are funded by two fellowships. My grant from Rice requires that I examine an environmental problem from multiple perspectives. I chose to come to Egypt for two months to research the distribution of costs and benefits of water projects. With the second fellowship, a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to research sustainable development in countries with indigenous populations, we will look at the interaction of western (or majority) beliefs with those of indigenous people in regards to common resource management, i.e.. conflict, cooperation, non-interaction, and more, to see how these affect sustainable development in the society.

Life in Cairo

Cairo is challenging and the internet access is scarce. Chris and I use the American University library. We are living in an apartment in the Seida Zeinab district of Cairo. When we tell someone in another region of Cairo where we live they ask, "Who took you there?" as though we lived on Mars.

Seida Zeinab is known as a "popular" area, but there are no other foreigners. People know their neighbors. It is noisy and crowded with an aura of community not found in other areas of the city. We live on a small side street in a two bedroom, fully furnished apartment, including a plastic prayer mat.

Early on we were stopped by our neighbor and asked for a favor for the wedding he was having that night. He wanted to hang some lights from our balcony. Sure, we said. He insisted that we come to the wedding, which was there in the street. We were the guests of honor. It was crazy, with over a dozen musicians, singers, and speakers blaring in our street. We tried to watch from the balcony but the groom motioned that we should come. We got lots of stares, no thanks to the Disc Jockey yelling out "Welcome to Egypt!" — his only English announcement. The DJ then grabbed Tirza’s hand and started to dance with her in the middle of the crowd. I thought this was hilarious, as Tirza wasn't doing Egyptian dances. I took pictures, then danced as well. It was a fun evening and a great way to meet the neighbors.

Children practice their English with us from the balconies above and the street below. We are invited for tea by shopkeepers and people on the street and often asked to return The teatime conversations teach us more about life here than any other experience. Egyptians are curious about America. Their questions tell us more about them than their answers.

A young man who owns a spice shop wants to go to America to marry. He asked us how much it costs to marry an American woman. We tried to explain that marriage in America is nothing like marriage in Egypt. Egyptian men marry in their late 30s because they must first have an apartment and all that goes with it.

They can’t understand why we don’t want a baby. Everyone tells us that we must have a baby in the first year to bind us together. Egyptians say that "each baby comes with his own money." Babies are an assumption here. A man asked Tirza how she can go to school and be married at the same time. Of course, he understood better when we told him there was no baby.

Cairo is a city of smells. In the market there are the smells of live chickens, pigeons, rabbits, goats, and ducks, the gamed smell of camel, which hangs on hooks, that of garbage and rotting fruit, all mixed with the fresh sweet smells of excellent fruit and exotic spices sold from great baskets.

We pass a sweet store that tempts us with baklava, fresh breads, cakes and chocolates, advertising themselves by wafting odors down the block. We stop here often because the owner likes us and offers tea and baklava. We have eaten 1.5 kilos of baklava. There is a tamia (falafel) and foul (beans) cafe on every block. A pita of either costs 50 piasters (about15 cents). Great fryers on the street full of eggplant counter the noxious odors that spill from vehicles. Cairo has no car emissions regulations and the air quality is bad. Lead poisoning is a huge problem, since they use leaded gas.

The government does not pick up the trash. Trash collectors do and collect directly from the people. The collectors sort the trash and make money through recycling. Because the trash of the poor has very little of value in it, the trash collectors won’t pick it up. The enormity of the solid waste problem in a city of 15 million is unimaginable. The wealthy neighborhoods are clean, but as income declines, the smells and animals increase.

We are pretty well adapted to the strange sights here. Donkeys, horses, sheep, goats and other animals on the streets are either working animals or for food. The building next to ours looks like it just fell down and is now a garbage heap. That is starting to feel like normal. The huge market with the fresh camel meat hanging is still strange. The fact that we actually live here is a little bizarre.

Night life is not too exciting. Everyone is around all night though — shops, taxis, and all. Attempting to speak Arabic with the kids on our block provides a good bit of entertainment, as does the television with 4 channels (one in English about half the time). Interactions with others are interesting, given the cultural gender roles. Sometimes during interviews, people will ignore Tirza and look at me (Chris), even if I direct attention to her. Other times they talk only to Tirza. When it comes to handing us big books, they are handed straight to me!

Egyptians have roles. Things don’t happen efficiently, but reflect class, hierarchy, and "order." One must ask directions of the person who deals with that task.

Chris went to the Giza pyramids, and together we visited a cluster of pyramids near us. From one spot you can see many, but trekking between gets old in the desert sun.

The research is going very well and keeps us busy. Government offices are open 8 a.m to 2 p.m. but people often don’t come in until 10 a.m. Generally, we can’t do more than one interview in a day, because it takes us an hour to get anywhere.

I have found people very willing to meet with me (Tirza). They have provided me with excellent and frank information. What I have learned has been so much more than answers to my interviews. I have a better, more realistic understanding of what sustainable development means in the third world.

Thank you all for your support and friendship.

Tirza and Chris

By VASU MURTY

I thank Don McMillan for his perspective on vegetarianism (Connections 7/99). Mr. McMillan seeks to reduce vegetarianism to absurdity. If vegetarians object to killing living creatures (it is argued), then logically they should object to killing plants as well as animals. But this is absurd. Therefore, it can’t be wrong to kill animals.

Fruitarians take the argument concerning plants quite seriously; they do not eat any food which causes injury or death to either animals or plants. This means, in their view, a diet of those fruits, nuts and seeds which can be eaten without the destruction of the plant that produces the food.

Finding an ethically significant line between plants and animals, though, is not particularly difficult. Plants are incapable of feeling pain. Nature does not create pain gratuitously, but only when it enables the organism to survive. Animals, being mobile, would benefit from having a sense of pain; plants would not.

Animals are highly complex creatures, possessing a brain, a central nervous system and a sophisticated mental life. Animals actually suffer at the hands of their human tormentors and exhibit such "human" behaviors and feelings as fear and physical pain, defense of their children, pair bonding, group/tribal loyalty, grief at the loss of loved ones, joy, jealousy, competition, territoriality, and cooperation.

Dr. Tom Regan, the foremost intellectual leader of the animal rights movement and author of The Case for Animal Rights, notes that animals "have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; and emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference and welfare interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their experiential life fares well or ill for them, logically independent of their being the object of anyone else’s interests."

In determining a boundary between sentient and insentient life, Peter Singer in Animal Liberation suggests that "somewhere between a shrimp and an oyster seems as good a place to draw the line as any, and better than most.

Even if one does not want to become a fruitarian and believes that plants have feelings (against all evidence to the contrary), it does not follow that vegetarianism is absurd. We ought to destroy as few plants as possible. And by raising and eating an animal for food, many more plants are destroyed indirectly by the animals we eat than if we merely ate the plants directly. Meat-eaters indirectly kill ten times more plants than do vegetarians!

Humans resemble the frugivorous primates. The healthiest populations with the longest lifespans — the Vilacambans of Ecuador, the Abhikasians of the former USSR, and the Hunzas of Pakistan — live almost entirely on plant foods.

Whereas a gulf of difference can be found between plants and animals, none of the differences between humans and animals seem to be ethically significant. Animals are just as intelligent and communicative as small children or even some mentally defective adult humans. If we do not eat small children and mentally defective humans, then what basis do we have for eating animals? C.S. Lewis and other Christians have even acknowledged that denying rights to animals merely because they do not exhibit the same level of rational thought most humans exhibit upon reaching full development justifies denying rights to the mentally handicapped, the senile, and many other classes of humans as well.

John Stuart Mill observed, "The reason for legal intervention in favor of children apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves— the animals." In his book, Christianity and the Rights of Animals, Reverend Andrew Linzey, an Anglican priest, notes that "In some ways, Christian thinking is already oriented in this direction. What is it that so appalls us about cruelty to children or oppression of the vulnerable, but that these things are betrayals of relationships of special care and special trust? Likewise, and even more so, in the case of animals who are mostly defenseless before us."

The way we treat animals is indicative of the way we treat our fellow humans. One Soviet study, published in Ogonyok, found that over 87 percent of a group of violent criminals had, as children, burned, hanged, or stabbed domestic animals. In our own country, a major study by Dr. Stephen Kellert of Yale University found that children who abuse animals have a much higher likelihood of becoming violent criminals.

Some of the greatest figures in human history have been in favor of animal rights. These include: Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, Alice Walker, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Browning, Percy Shelley, Voltaire, Thomas Hardy, Rachel Carson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Wesley, Victor Hugo, St. Francis of Assisi, Jean-Jacques Rosseau, Pythagoras, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Schweitzer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gertrude Stein, Frederick Douglass, Francis Bacon, William Wordsworth, the Buddha, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau.