STANISLAUS CONNECTIONS

ACTIONS FOR PEACE
sponsored by Peace Life Center, Public invited

MODESTO PEACE LIFE CENTER VIGILS: Vigils are held once a month; Friday evenings; call the Center for info: 529-5750.
PEACE LIFE CENTER WILL BE OPEN EVERY TUESDAY, Noon to 3 pm. Come by for coffee or tea and just to chat or look at our book and magazine collection. Bring your own bag lunch; there may be films some days. 720 13th St. Call us 529-5750, we'll get back to you with info on vigils and other activities.
Click here for other Peace Actions around the Valley and Mother Lode

Put these Peaceful dates on your calendar:

June 23-25- Peace Camp, weekend in the High Sierra for people of all ages-Register now!

ACTION: To volunteer to help, contact the Modesto Peace/Life Center at 529-5750.

Twenty years ago, human and design errors at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine resulted in the world's worst nuclear accident. During that time, I made 6 trips to the exclusion zone to evacuate children affected by nuclear radiation.

Tragedies come and go. Some tragedies touch us profoundly and stay with us forever, remaining in our memories, hearts and minds. This one must always remind us all of the responsibility we share before our fragile green planet and its sustainable environment.

I lived in the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine, only 48 miles from Chernobyl. Numerous lakes and rivers embraced by lavish forests made this area especially attractive for cabins, country homes, sanatoriums, and children’s summer camps. My second year of teaching was coming to an end; we were heading for summer vacations.

The Chernobyl catastrophe happened suddenly! Unlike the Katrina disaster, it had not been followed by satellite radars and shown on TV for days. And unlike Katrina, we did not know it happened. BOOM!!! Explosion, fire, meltdown, radioactive fallout — and we did not know anything. Air, water, soil nuclear contamination — we were totally unaware. When I say "we" I mean the regular people of Ukraine. Why did we remain ignorant hours, even days after the deadly nuclear disaster? First, we cannot see, smell or taste radiation. We simply consume and accumulate it. Second, and most important, Soviet authorities did not tell us what really happened. They thought they could successfully cover it up like they were used to doing with almost everything else.

Kiev, a city of 2.5 million people, was blissfully unaware of strontium, cesium and other radioactive particles streaming down on it for 3 long days. That's how long it took the government to finally acknowledge that something "not very serious" had happened. Children attended school, happily playing in the grass and in the sand, which by that time had turned deadly with contamination. So many of them innocently enjoyed the fresh morning dew and warm spring rain which were totally radioactive. No one knew.

As a young English teacher, I was in the habit of listening to the BBC World Service on my radio. I listened late at night because the Soviet government could not jam it as effectively. All of a sudden I heard that something outrageously terrible had befallen my own area! The radio announced that radioactive particles had been detected in Sweden and suggested it could be nuclear fallout from Chernobyl. I rushed to call as many of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances as I possibly could.

Frantic people stayed indoors and kept their children inside. It hurt tremendously to see the empty streets, schools, and playgrounds. The city looked deserted. Even though it was such warm, beautiful spring weather, normally opened windows were tightly closed and sealed. Soviet apartments and homes had no air conditioning. Adults protected their heads with hats and scarves and moved hastily from one building to another. Unless people had to venture outside to buy groceries and other basic necessities, they spent all their time inside very hot and stifling dwellings.

The tension among the population was amplified by the absence of true and competent information. May Day parade was gloriously conducted by the communist rulers, even though most of them had managed to send their own children far away from the monstrous Reactor # 4. Rumors and hearsay remained the main source of desperately needed information for many days. Even the professionals — doctors, scientists, the military — did not know what to do, let alone how to do it. The first time that the citizens of Kiev were given any official medical advice was on May 6, ten full days after the nuclear accident. On May 8 the official Soviet position was still that anyone who lived outside the exclusion zone of 18 miles wasn't in any danger. Somehow, those competent party bosses decided that the barbwire fences miraculously contained radiation strictly within the limits declared by their meeting's resolution.

By the time the government somehow reacted, the level of the radioactive contamination over Kiev had peaked. The release of nearly 100 million curies of various forms of radioactivity over these 10 days affected almost all of Europe. Many countries hastily passed extreme measures, including the ban of food imports from Eastern Europe. Thousands of sheep were slaughtered as far north as Scotland.

Still, we Soviet Europeans were trying to ascertain just what had happened. We were still trying to catch any true information from foreign radio stations about the situation in our own Ukraine.

Kiev began to suspect the worst. Special water trucks were brought in twice a day to wash down the streets and the lower parts of the buildings to prevent the accumulation of fallout particles. Officially, this was said to be done "to prevent the spread of disease." When sales of milk in Kiev were forbidden, people stopped buying fruit and vegetables altogether. Children especially suffered from the lack of vitamins after the long winter when no fresh produce was available.

I volunteered to evacuate children from Chernobyl without notifying my own parents. I did not want them to worry. After brief training with outdated radiation detection equipment they dispatched me to the "zone." The government did not announce evacuation until 19 days after the nuclear explosion!

All this time the children had been fully exposed to those unseen gamma, beta and alpha rays and particles. Almost complete lack of reliable information made it very difficult to convince parents to let their kids go. Oftentimes, I spent hours convincing parents that their children should leave with me to go farther from the still leaking and smoldering Reactor # 4.

Once released by their parents, children developed many anxieties and became really stressed out. They had to spend up to three months far from their comfort zone and support system. That was when I decided to seriously study Educational and Developmental Psychology.

Pregnant women and those with newborns did not wait for the official decision to evacuate. They started leaving Kiev as soon as they could for any potential haven, no matter how distant. The huge Kiev train station looked like a scene from a wartime movie: crowded platforms, crying children, desperate mothers, and policemen with megaphones. Rapidly, there were no tickets available in any direction, except to the equally contaminated Belarus. All the trains arriving in Kiev were empty.

Schools became the evacuation centers for children aged 6 to 17. We evacuated them from the makeshift platforms outside Kiev to the Donetsk region or the Black Sea. Each time, I was in charge of evacuating groups of 15 to 20 children. After six such trips, I was permitted to find my homeroom class and work with them in the Crimea for a month. Although, the children had enough food, health care and sports activities, their emotional and psychological condition was rather perilous. The summer camps were quite comfortable, but the physically long-term seclusion along with moral isolation from their beloved ones proved very difficult. Somehow, the children learned about those who had already died in the unequal battle with radiation. As if children of war, our children lost their innocence and became serious grown-ups within months.

Those children, the former future of Ukraine, knew first hand what a nuclear catastrophe such as Chernobyl can inflict upon humanity and its environment.

Hopefully, the rest of the world will never have to learn. So let us hope actively and protect our green planet together.

It started in April as Stanislaus County’s three most conservative supervisors, one seeking re-election in June, felt a need to toss raw meat at the constituency that seats most conservatives these days: the Falwell-esque evangelicals.

They picked a favorite target of the right, those pointy-headed liberals who read county library books.

They focused on an innocuous April 22 program about belly dancing. (Bee writer Tim Moran reported that the library has ten books and a lesson CD on this entirely respectable mid eastern art form.)

And they convinced an unelected official, county CEO Rick Robinson, to order it canceled.

That riled area free thinkers as they’d hardly been riled since a like dilemma hit then-librarian Oscar Smaalders a quarter century ago:

Someone on that board took umbrage at a photo display of farm labor housing offending agricultural pooh-bahs. And nude (gasp!) art too.

Oscar stood by his guns, at some personal sacrifice - like his next pay raise. But the carnage spawned the Friends of the Library. Yes, those book sales began as a response to censorship threats.

The 2006 campaign for a free library, invoking such dated ideas as the First Amendment and intellectual freedoms codified by the American Library Association, is chugging along on several cylinders.

Stanislaus County librarian Vanessa Czopek, a grandmother of mild demeanor who expressed idealism and courage recently in attacking the Patriot Act, spoke with Liberal Voices in early May.

She and her predecessor backgrounded the situation and heard plans discussed to write press and county lawmakers, pass petitions and informative materials at farmers’ markets and other gatherings.

“The County Executive’s decision to cancel Chris Wilde’s class on belly dancing bears the hallmarks of a classic case of censorship. The decision was made not by library personnel but by a government outsider: the County Chief Executive Officer.

The UUFSC board approved, for a vote by the entire fellowship at the end of May, a resolution citing the UU covenant to a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.

It notes that libraries exist to provide free access to materials, ideas, resources, programs and information, offers the community a chance to be informed, literate, educated and culturally enriched through a full range of programs that reflect cultural diversity.

ACTION: Read more at the American Library Association, www.ala.org, and the ACLU, www.aclu.org. Then write your supervisors:

For details on the campaign - to circulate petitions, staff tables, etc. - write “Uncensor the Library” Box 578163, Modesto, 95357-8163, contact Friends of the Library, P.O. Box 4565, Modesto, CA 95352, or call Joan Patterson, 575-1644, or Ann Krabach, 667-1824.

Signature gathering is underway to qualify a local initiative for the November ballot. (Deadline: end of June)

Dubbed "Stamp out Sprawl" or "SOS", the measure calls for citizens to vote whenever agricultural land in Stanislaus county is proposed for conversion to subdivision.

Remember "Measure A" and "Measure M", that require a vote of the people before a planning area can be annexed to the City of Modesto? This time, Denny Jackman's target is all of Stanislaus County.

With the county's plans to develop from Kiernan to the river, with no plans to make the area a city, a huge tract of the best farmland in the world is in danger. The population growth numbers in the Central Valley are staggering, and those supporting this initiative are worried.

ACTION: Petitions are available at McHenry Bowl or from Denny Jackman, SOSinitiative@clearwire.net, or 247-2503.

MJC professor and peace activist retires

Dan Onorato and wife, Mary Alice. Dan retired in May after 36 years teaching at Modesto Junior College. Photo: Jim Costello (with Dan’s camera!)

“Open your mind and your heart to the reality around you, care about it, and do something.”

With these words spoken in his office last week, Dan Onorato summed up a rich career of teaching, leadership and inspiration. Onorato, English and Spanish professor at Modesto Junior College, will retire at the end of this semester after 36 years of dedicated service; his words and influence will not soon be forgotten by the many members of faculty, friends and students on whom Onorato has had an impact.

“I think he is a saintly man in his generosity and desire to serve others,” said Dr. Jim Beggs, Literature and Language Arts professor.

“He’s got such a positive attitude about what he does as a teacher and as a human being,” said Mike Smedshammer, English Professor at MJC. “He knows what you do with your time on Planet Earth: you give your life to serving other people and make the world a better place.”

Only surpassing Onorato’s reputation as a devoted teacher is his renown in the community for working to improve the lives of people everywhere. He has worked for many years with the Peace Life Center, an organization dedicated to working for social change through nonviolent methods since 1971. The Center has worked on different issues over the years such as draft counseling, alternative energy and reducing consumption patterns. Onorato has been arrested twice; once at the Livermore Lab, where he protested regularly against the development of nuclear weapons, and again at the Nevada test site.

During the Vietnam War, Onorato brought the complexities of the war home to MJC. He insisted that contemporary issues — even a war — needed to be examined thoroughly, with scholarly depth. He feels the same about the current war in Iraq.

His eldest daughter Satya Onorato recalled, “Our bookshelves are lined with books about the Vietnam War and the media that he read to prepare himself to coordinate an interdisciplinary course about the Vietnam War.”

Onorato traces his high level of social concern to his upbringing in San Francisco, where he was born, and in Marin County.

He saw a surfeit of inequality throughout his youth starting in his own home. He was one of six children, two of whom were mentally handicapped, causing his mother distress. His father owned a meat market in San Francisco that was at the center of the “black ghetto,” exposing him to poverty. His father consciously hired both black and white workers.

“I grew up with the tremendous instinctive sense that life isn’t fair,” Onorato said. “I wanted to try and make it better.” That, according to him, was his driving force.

Onorato grew up in Marin County and went to Catholic high schools, graduating from St. Joseph’s College Seminary with plans of becoming a Catholic priest. He earned his baccalaureate degree in philosophy from St. Patrick’s College Seminary and then traveled to Rome, where he studied theology at Gregorian University. He went on to receive his master’s in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkley, in 1969.

While in the seminary, Onorato was influenced by the Catholic Workers Movement and the writings and social gospel of its founder, Dorothy Day, as well as theologian Thomas Merton and activist priest/poet Daniel Berrigan.

His decision to leave the seminary was based on several factors, one of which was his desire for a family life. Others were that he didn’t completely agree with the authority structure of the church and felt he would be always be a “rebel,” and that his inquisitive nature made him unsure that he would be able to provide answers to other questioning people.

He began teaching at MJC in the fall of 1969. Shortly after, he met Mary Alice, a nursing student from Guyana (her mother is Brazilian). They married in 1972, and had three children, Satya, Talya and Kriya. Mary Alice Onorato now teaches nursing at MJC.

After 34 years of marriage Mary Alice Onorato said, “I love him more than anything in the world. He is just the kindest, most caring person I’ve ever met.”

Over the years, Onorato earned the admiration of many colleagues, as evidenced by the Purdy Award for teaching that he received in 2001.

“Dan has his priorities in the right places, always balancing his family, community and teaching lives. He is deeply committed to peace, and he lives what he believes,” said Kathy Shaw, retired MJC professor of literature. “He looks at the international picture, is very well-informed politically, and can be counted on for being thoughtful, compassionate and wise in analysis and judgment.”

One special project for which he received great recognition was the 2001 Faces of Stanislaus Project, largely funded by the Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project invited members of the greater MJC community to submit photos reflecting their families’ origins. Curating the exhibit took over a year and involved many other colleagues from across the disciplines.

“As a photographic exhibit it was unusual in that all of the work was that of amateur photographers and yet it revealed so much about the people of this community,” said journalism Professor Laura Paull, who was on the committee. The show hung in the Stanislaus County government building downtown for several months.

“He devoted enormous time and energy to the 2001 Faces of Stanislaus exhibit, which represented the diverse cultural heritage of Stanislaus County through photos of community members and their families,” said Satya Onorato.

The fact that he teaches Spanish as well as English is also the result of his many life experiences.

At the end of his first year of college, Onorato traveled to Mexico with his uncle, who started a group called Amigos Anonymous that helped underprivileged people in small villages. Onorato was so intrigued by this that he returned to Mexico for the next five summers.

“That gave [me] a dimension of the rest of the world,” he said. “It opened my vistas to the way we live and the way [other] people live.”

Long time friend and colleague Paul Neumann, the former Dean of Literature and Language Arts and a current member of the YCCD Board of Trustees, says “He has a deep care for other people, especially disadvantaged people. He leads by example, not by what he says, but by what he does.”

Onorato’s influences also include people such as Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi, both of whom notoriously worked towards social change through non-violence. One characteristic Onorato finds in both King and Gandhi, and all people who work towards social and economic change, is having vision.

“[The] opposite of despair is imagination,” he said. According to Onorato, people who are willing to make change are all capable of imagining a different world. To be able to envision a world without racism and discrimination, a world void of inequality and injustice is a quality that Onorato admires as well as possesses. He understands that while the world isn’t perfect and probably never will be, you have to keep pushing for your cause.

“You don’t have the expectation that you’re going to solve all the problems right away,” he said. “You do what you think is right in the face of injustice and evil and you keep on.”

With the current war in Iraq, with which Onorato strongly disagrees, as he does with any war, he finds himself feeling as if America is moving in a counterproductive motion. When he finds himself feeling lost, he looks back at history and sees the progress the country has made with slavery ending and women’s rights improving and he finds his faith again.

“I’ve been despairing at times; things don’t change overnight,” he said. “If you truly believe in humanity you can’t take a short-sided view of it; you have to look long range.”

Smedshammer has observed many faculty members retire, and according to him the standard procedure is to slow down and quietly back off, but not for Onorato.

“He still has the same enthusiasm with every student, every meeting, every interaction he’s had. He’s a good example of someone who is doing it right, all the way to the finish line.”

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT ARTICLES TO CONNECTIONS.

Tenth of each month. Submit peace, justice and environmentally friendly event notices to P.O. Box 134, Modesto, CA, 95353, or call 522-4967 or 575-4299, or email to Jim Costello. Free listings subject to space, availability and editing.

Online Edition: June 2006 Vol. XVIII, No. 10

Put these Peaceful dates on your calendar:

CONTENTS

Genocide in Sudan begs for attention: Darfur death toll will be spotlighted by Sunday of vigils (article by Tim Nonn)

How to Make Solar Power Cost-Effective by Chris Thompson, in East Bay Express

A Gathering of Voices--Helene Lee

COMMUNITY CALENDAR --CURRENT & COMING EVENTS

Remember Chernobyl

Jim de Martini: demartinij@mail.co.stanislaus.ca.us

MJC professor and peace activist retires

They’re Listening

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT ARTICLES TO CONNECTIONS.