What Is It Like? Being a Rape Survivor in Trump's America

What is it Like?

What is it like? My friend asks me on the phone, two days after Donald Trump was elected to office. My friend is a lovely homosexual man, one of the best people I've ever known, with a great capacity for compassion and standing up for what he believe's in, and an artist's mastery with design sense. His southern charm adds a flair to his accent, as he tells me about what it is like living back in the Carolinas with the KKK celebrating the accent of "their" President.

He wants me to explain my end of how it feels being a survivor of rape in this time of regime change in one or two words. We have been talking survivor tactics, getting in shape, getting pepper spray for all our friends. The closest I come up with I don't fit into a couple words. "It is like being a Jew at the start of Hitler's Germany, instead it is about sexual assault and being a woman".  Since that is too long, I try "terrifying" and "hollow".

What is it like? Seeing the rape culture dancing on full display after my own brutal end to life happened just over a year ago in 2015, and what I have found out happens when an American citizen fights to do all they can to report and prosecute a third class felony in this country? 

The truth is, the onslaught of all it does to me, asking that question, is so loaded and full of so much to answer it stuns my throat. All I would really have in answer is a very scratchy, heady silence. I have taken such a beating in my own mind it seems closer to the movie "Concussion" about what happens to the NFL players' brains with traumatic impact after traumatic impact to the mind.

So here I am. In this "terrifying" moment, because I am doing something very dangerous, and very inflaming, and very rebellious and revolutionary. I am writing down an honest answer. I am telling the truth. And I am making myself a martyr to more abuse by an invisible wall of strangers who will attack me in response. I already know it is pulling the trigger because I have had the utterly horrifying experience of witnessing and living what "you" all do to people who come forward with the most devastating thing a person could ever admit. And I have had to re-live it, again and again, shared deaths by friendships, as all the people around me suddenly get very honest, and my friends, and the last woman I talked to for any length of time in a joint work effort, and the one before her, and sometimes one of my friends who are a gay man, and a man I dated, begin to tell me when it was done to them. When they were children, my age, or older. When they were gang raped, raped by their father, their cousin, their brother, when they were in college, when it processes in their mind as we are talking that the impact ringing in the suppressed backdrop of their life, those MORE THAN ONCE! times in college, they can now recognize that their friend since childhood raped them that night...

And the thing is, I am drowning, I am BLOWN AWAY, by all these stories building up around me. It is like a wall of bodies slowly growing a wall on all fronts. Another casualty, another murdered life forced to walk in the oppression of "normalcy" every day. Like reversed zombies. Here is my shell. I walk around and no one blinks, no one sees that I am dead. The color drained from all life around me, a mockery of my daily joys, to parade in a macabre dance, it feels like Day of the Dead, without the respect of it. And I want to scream for each one, scream and scream and never stop for the injustice, for my love of them, these people who open up because I am a buffer against the storm just to know what it is like too.

Don't tell me you understand, by the way, if you have not gone through this. People say that, meaning to be nice or supportive at times. But usually I see quite clearly how much they don't. No, you don't, and it is not something to wish for. This is not a judgement. It is an acknowledgment of a discovered reality. Lady Gaga said it best, "'Til It Happens to You, you won't know, no it won't be real." There has never been a truer statement.

And that, this very devastating reality, is the heart of the rape culture. That someone who has never lost their life and had to stand broken in its remains without acknowledgment of the sentence to a living hell of undeserved pain, that is continuously, viciously added to, often most viciously because of a disturbing level of complete unawareness of those perpetrating it around you, is the hardest thing to ever talk about. And even when you do, even when you come forward, about the most personal, devastating experience possible, the brutal further cruelties continue a snowball of abuses, until you feel completely swallowed up, and silenced as a need for continued survival.

I have always been active in organizing people to stand up against oppressive forces in society. I have organized for better city planning with the Hold The Line movement in Miami-Dade County when I was in high school, to avoid urban sprawl into rural areas that buffer the Everglades and create a danger for hurricane evacuations with overpopulation and overburdened hurricane evacuation routes. I was hugely active at the start of March Against Monsanto Miami in 2013, fighting for our right for health after losing my uncle to diabetes and having all my family face it as well as other food related illnesses. I walked with the Miccosukee organizers this past March to stop the further damning of water flow and destruction of the Everglades and Big Cypress preserves with the expansion of Tamiami Trail, a road that cuts across the natural system, for the River of Grass Greenway project, a green washed million dollar construction project to expand the road in the name of a bike trail. Really interesting how it also serves to help oil companies get access to oil in the biggest oil grab in the history of our national parks that is taking place within one of our most fragile landscapes, and adding some icing to that cake, it was erupting on the national parks celebration year, a hundred years of our national parks, and here is how we celebrate that-by destroying it for big oil.

 And now I am organizing to raise awareness to stop the Sabal Trail Pipeline, just like Standing Rock it is decimating our water system and cutting across our landscape and it seems no one who lives here in Florida knows about it because it goes unreported in the news. 

And yet, with all that, what I am the most qualified to speak to, this dark and nasty cultural petri dish that I have been forced to find out all the devastating details to, has rendered me silent. The reality of what it has meant to find out I am sentenced to by being born a woman in this world. I have never found out an uglier, more devastating, and even more shockingly, so far reaching, cultural wrong to fight against. It is so ugly, the truth is I just feel shock that it has become so real. I cannot believe what I have just experienced, and how many people I am finding out are silently living in an underground Dark Ages. It just makes me feel like not getting up in the morning. I feel like my life has been washed away by tears. Carried off in a current, and like one of my closest girlfriends said after it happened, "welcome to the secret club of crying women across America."

The ironic thing about being oppressed, is how I wanted to deal with this problem. When I was earning my BA at Florida State University, my college room mates were working with the Baptist collegiate ministry to end sex trafficking. And me, on this one I wanted to say "no thank you" because I had already been drenched in the Special Victims Unit cop shows for years in family living rooms, I had been trained to be afraid of my inherited mantra of fear from everyone around me, be careful or you will be "raped and murdered."

"Park under a light", "Park near the entrance", "Have your keys out before going to your car", "Never talk to strangers", "Never put your drink down", "Don't run with your headphones on", "Never go alone", "Practice saying 'NO'", "S.I.N.G.", "doorknob", "arms distance away"...

The way I wanted to be feminist, was to live the life I chose. I have always been a competitive over achiever. Top class ranks, honors, extra curriculars, a propensity for developing difficult skills. I wanted to get my degree, and that was my feminism. To be the dynamic human being I had decided to become in the world. I wanted to get my BA in Studio Art, minor in Creative Writing, develop my singing, write down my stories, develop my awareness of psychology to make characters grounded in reality, practice acting to get to live out the stories in an exciting way in real life and engage their ways of thinking first hand. I wanted to make my books, direct their films, a way to use all my skills in one place, the very well rounded world of film making. I couldn't go wrong with researching, costume development, history, artwork, music, speaking, it was the Renaissance girl's answer to everything. And then I thought, once I have done that youth sensitive job, my adventure, physically demanding  scenes, beauty hungry industry, then I can get brainy again, go back to degree seeking, become a sustainable design architect, move from activist in my wise older decades into being politically involved to "be the change I want to see in the world" as Gandhi said.

See the problem with this idea, is that is not how oppression works. Oppression means you don't get a choice. It means your life gets taken away from you, that you do not get to continue to really belong to yourself in your experience. It means forced against your will. 

I was born into this mess. And then I get shoved with the blame. The shame. The guilt of others and their sexual abuses. Something that is no one else's business becomes an excuse for taking. For taking everything from me.

See, it started to dawn on me in college. With the line of blue lights, stretching into the distance. So when running, you can hit one. With the drunken culture of fraternities and sororities like a culturally enforced brand of "Lord of the Flies" that is indulged in dorm hall corridors.

But see me, my friends called me "the lucky one". Because I had been studious and sheltered as an only child, I was thriving into myself. But time would make me see what they really were referring to. When growing older made "18" a free for all, and the pieces of myself started to be more and more noticeably chipped away. Sadly, the highest level of abuse is what made me recognize trauma, and after college I began unpacking the load of damaged self concepts I didn't know I was carrying around because I was a "girl". It started when I began to fully comprehend that this trauma, was a sensation I recognized. When I followed the memories, I began to realize how much I had invalidated before because I was not one of the "unlucky" ones, because I had not been raped as a child, I had a loving family growing up.

The Power of A Seed- From an Organizer of the first March Against Monsanto in Miami Florida 2013

The story of a 4th generation farmer and seed cleaner who went toe to toe with Monsanto.

As I review some of the research I did back in 2013 when I was an organizer for the March Against Monsanto Miami, I feel a deeper personal connection to the themes of brutal control of that which reproduces in the world than I did at that time. My sense of moral outrage at the crushing bully tactics that big corporate bodies employ on good farmers, silencing them as they eradicate and threaten our natural food heritage lines of the earth- all for exploitation and profit- hit me with a deeper hollowness than they did four years ago. I feel worn and tired from learning far too much about these things.  I remember then that I had a brightness and thundering in the face of injustice, knowing this was wrong to do to others and a threat to all of our food and genetic lineage. Now I sit to write this without fervor, but it is something that needs to be put in a bigger context. So for that purpose I will endeavor to write about it.

The deep wound of the earth is connected to all the topics rising to be addressed now with the marches taking place across the face of the planet. And at the heart of them all is a mentality. It is a brutal mentality. A pattern of control and suppression of the loving possibility of life for narrow profit of one at expense of another. Today I am going to look at the control of power. The deepest right, the power of life. Today I will look at the power of a seed. And the history of the healing power of plants, of the health they give us, the natural laws they orchestrate to in their own rhythms, and the deep pattern that I see repeating as the overthrow of matriarchy and the overthrow of nature's self-perpetuating order by the operations of controlling forces within mankind. 

The suppression of seeds and control of genetic lines has a long history. As mentioned in the above film "Seeds of Fear" even in the old Testament Pharaoh kept seeds from the Israelites as a form of control and suppression. What I would like to look at now is a bit closer to the rise of our modern era. It is the connection of the rise of the medical institutions with the burning of the medicine women of Europe.

As a little girl around Halloween I would read one of my illustrated history books about the Salem witch trials. I had a series of a bunch of topics, from the Titanic to Pocahontas. Now the witch trials have a much clearer implication as I see how they are continuing to play out today. What is very important about it for our modern times particularly for this article, has to do with bigger forces moving into place in that era. It had to do with the assault on the old world systems of health and medicine which were carried by the wise keepers of plant knowledge. That old woman making tinctures over her cauldron? She was the town midwife, the lore keeper of ancient earth based beliefs as well as, very significantly, plant based knowledge. 

http://Witches, Midwives, and Nurses- A History of Women Healers

As outlined in this article "Witches, Midwives, and Nurses- A History of Women Healers" published in 1973 by the Feminist Press at CUNY, the mass hysteria of witch hunting in Europe that took place between the 14th and 17th centuries was tied greatly to control of the church and suppression of the peasant healers which were mainly autonomously operating women. Much of this comes from misogynistic fears, a suspicion of women as sexual threat and the fact that self operating healers were empiricists:

 "The witch-healer’s methods were as great a threat (to the Catholic Church, if not the Protestant) as her results, for the witch was an empiricist: She relied on her senses rather than on faith or doctrine, she believed in trial and error, cause and effect. Her attitude was not religiously passive, but actively inquiring. She trusted her ability to find ways to deal with disease, pregnancy and childbirth – whether through medications or charms. In short, her magic was the science of her time."

The article continues with this description of anti-empirical thought of the Church. Realize this has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, but with the fearful controls of an institution made by man, as this is the real theme at play against the seeds of the world, reproduction, silencing, and violent eradication and abuse we are looking at: they are instruments of control-

"The Church, by contrast, was deeply anti-empirical. It discredited the value of the material world, and had a profound distrust of the senses. There was no point in looking for natural laws that govern physical phenomena, for the world is created anew by God in every instant. Kramer and Sprenger, in the Malleus, quote St. Augustine on the deceptiveness of the senses:

... Now the motive of the will is something perceived through the senses or the intellect, both of which are subject to the power of the devil. For St. Augustine says in Book 83: This evil, which is of the devil, creeps in by all the sensual approaches; he places himself in figures, he adapts himself to colors, he attaches himself to sounds, he lurks in angry and wrongful conversation, he abides in smells, he impregnates with flavours and fills with certain exhalations all the channels of the understanding.

The senses are the devil’s playground, the arena into which he will try to lure men away from Faith and into the conceits of the intellect or the delusions of carnality.

In the persecution of the witch, the anti-empiricist and the misogynist, anti-sexual obsessions of the Church coincide: Empiricism and sexuality both represent a surrender to the senses, a betrayal of faith. The witch was a triple threat to the Church: She was a woman, and not ashamed of it. She appeared to be part of an organized underground of peasant women. And she was a healer whose practice was based in empirical study. In the face of the repressive fatalism of Christianity, she held out the hope of change in this world."

The article then details the larger picture of the continuing themes that all power must be derived from men, therefore establishing the basis of the medical institution, which was acceptable medical treatment for the upper classes. I find it interesting that the great need for self directed women healers arose from the churches' stance on health for the peasant masses, this was the healthcare platform in that era:

 "...in the same number we reckon all good Witches, which do no hurt but good, which do not spoil and destroy, but save and deliver...It were a thousand times better for the land if all Witches, but especially the blessing Witch, might suffer death.

Witch-healers were often the only general medical practitioners for a people who had no doctors and no hospitals and who were bitterly afflicted with poverty and disease. In particular, the association of the witch and the midwife was strong: “No one does more harm to the Catholic Church than midwives,” wrote witch-hunters Kramer and Sprenger.

The Church itself had little to offer the suffering peasantry:

On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores, crying for help, – and words were all they got: “You have sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank him; you will suffer so much the less torment in the life to come. Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers for the dead?” 
(Jules Michelet, Satanism and Witchcraft)

When faced with the misery of the poor, the Church turned to the dogma that experience in this world is fleeting and unimportant. But there was a double standard at work, for the Church was not against medical care for the upper class. Kings and nobles had their court physicians who were men, sometimes even priests. The real issue was control: Male upper class healing under the auspices of the Church was acceptable, female healing as part of a peasant subculture was not.

The Church saw its attack on peasant healers as an attack on magic, not medicine. The devil was believed to have real power on earth, and the use of that power by peasant women – whether for good or evil – was frightening to the Church and State. The greater their satanic powers to help themselves, the less they were dependent on God and the Church and the more they were potentially able to use their powers against God’s order. Magic charms were thought to be at least as effective as prayer in healing the sick, but prayer was Church-sanctioned and controlled while incantations and charms were not. Thus magic cures, even when successful, were an accursed interference with the will of God, achieved with the help of the devil, and the cure itself was evil. There was no problem in distinguishing God’s cures from the devil’s, for obviously the Lord would work through priests and doctors rather than through peasant women."

And I would like to point out some of the more disturbing thoughts this is based on, that a woman could not have her own power to stand on, or ability, or anything resembling a dignity of action, it had to come from a man- namely Satan- because a smart and capable and good woman is something not to be believed as possible. Here are some of the examples of institutionalized misogyny listed:

"The medieval Catholic Church elevated sexism to a point of principle: The Malleus declares, “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” The misogyny of the Church, if not proved by the witch-craze itself, is demonstrated by its teaching that in intercourse the male deposits in the female a homunculus, or “little person,” complete with soul, which is simply housed in the womb for nine months, without acquiring any attributes of the mother. The homunculus is not really safe, however, until it reaches male hands again, when a priest baptises it, ensuring the salvation of its immortal soul.

Another depressing fantasy of some medieval religious thinkers was that upon resurrection all human beings would be reborn as men!

In the eyes of the Church, all the witches’ power was ultimately derived from her sexuality. Her career began with sexual intercourse with the devil. Each witch was confirmed at a general meeting (the witches’ Sabbath) at which the devil presided, often in the form of a goat, and had intercourse with the neophytes. In return for her powers, the witch promised to serve him faithfully. (In the imagination of the Church even evil could only be thought of as ultimately male-directed!) As the Malleus makes clear, the devil almost always acts through the female, just as he did in Eden:

All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which in women is insatiable...Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort with devils...it is sufficiently clear that it is no matter for wonder that there are more women than men found infected with the heresy of witchcraft...And blessed be the Highest Who has so far preserved the male sex from so great a crime ..."

These beliefs led to the systematic murder of women that can be estimated to be in the millions:

"The extent of the witch-craze is startling: In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries there were thousands upon thousands of executions – usually live burnings at the stake – in Germany, Italy and other countries. In the mid-sixteenth century the terror spread to France, and finally to England. One writer has estimated the number of executions at an average of 600 a year for certain German cities – or two a day, “leaving out Sundays.: Nine-hundred witches were destroyed in a single year in the Wertzberg area, and 1000 in and around Como. At Toulouse, four-hundred were put to death in a day. In the Bishopric of Trier, in 1585, two villages were left with only one female inhabitant each. Many writers have estimated the total number killed to have been in the millions. Women made up some 85 percent of those executed – old women, young women and children."

This does not include the specific incidents of Salem Massachusettes. I have walked those streets and heard the stories. I did not feel a spooky thrill of a ghost tour, but a sad chill and disturbed confusion at it. Now I am understanding where these ugly demons really live. I see it in the twist of a man's face I have trusted my whole life since childhood. I see it in the attack of nature. In the control of the feminine mysteries of the wonders of the body. In the control of a seed. 

We do not often pay enough attention to the old adage "history repeats itself". These events are often mostly glossed over, referenced in a history class, but there does not seem much attention besides at Halloween given to the mass murder of millions upon millions of women in Europe, the Angloid massacre of the women of their own people. This was also largely an attack on the ancient indigenous healing traditions of ancient European practice. So why do I talk about it now? Because this horrific abuse has not disappeared. It still is the underlying platform. It happens one attack at a time, and now the big bullies are still the outgrowth of those first rearing institutions. The institutions now are corporations, multinational bullies, and the fear of women and control of the masses has taken form in the usurping of the first female power, the power of life to follow its own pattern, its own genetic code, and that is the power of the seed itself. Women are the seed of humanity. I was struck by these signs at the Million Women's March in Washington D.C. that I participated in with the women of my family. They hit me to my core. They actually choked me, a breaking on so much having been shoved inside me from the shock of what I have experienced, finding a sudden crack in the pressure, a gasp of air suddenly escaping, it somehow was so personal and FINALLY a clear value of myself and those like me in front of my eyes, when it had been a sea of people turning cold and alien around me as my massacre took place, my erase and shaming and blaming without notice in another betrayer’s blink that I thought I could find compassion in. It was an overwhelm of so much tumbling out at once, to witness a different sea, one filled by people who were taking the stand I needed when I felt like barely holding myself up anymore. I was moved by the people flooding around me, educators, healers, empiricists of life experience, carriers of dignity and knowledge and family story.

The Earth is our Mother because we were born of the gentle orchestrations of the Garden of Life, the Devine haven breathed Life by the Unseen Mystery of Spirit. Doesn’t the scientist devoutly serve this by complete dedication to exploration and understanding of this world? Is it not astonishing how refined the connections are between all living things? The oxygen of plants, the living networks from the micro to the macro, the order that gives us healing, well being, and balance.

We, the seeds of the Earth, have been buried by a brutal controlling system so ubiquitous its devastations are enstated unquestioned in societal norms. But the cost lies strewn in the face of our future. This is the right of our connected lives- to our bodies, our genetic heritage for our children still to be born, of our tillers of the soil to get to do something as simple as plant seeds, to be fertilized by bees and the rhythms of nature undisrupted by the belittling controls of man. These attitudes of the abuses of the dignity of Life, and of Her Rite to execute Her sacred charges on Her own autonomous powers, are desecrations of the stewardship of mankind to the loving care of the Garden of Life that we have here. Lean close, and notice the truth in that Origin story, the first people given the gift of this beautiful world, charged by the Mystery that creates their lives to be “good stewards”, care takers now of this chance to form, to live, to connect, to have meaning by the delicate and powerful forces intertwined with their existence. The responsibility of humanity is to uphold the sacredness of Life. Not only because it is morally sound, but also because it is necessary for the sacred gift of human lives to be upheld. To understand this as it applies to the rights of all lives that share this Earth, each interconnected in a web that supports us and is a whole. This means the respect of the power of woman, this means the future, this means that which grows, to care for and respect the power of a seed. 

When I worked on the Monsanto campaign, it was obvious- the cry of nature- with the collapsing of the bee colonies, the threat of the terminator gene, a gene to cut off the rights of plants to procreate on their own infinitely beautiful abilities as they have for millions of years, not for any benefit but the control of seeds for the financial exploitive profit of companies like Monsanto, with its history of horrifying chemical monstrosities like agent orange used in operation Ranch Hand in the Vietnam War as herbicidal warfare that damages genes, resulting in deformities in exposed victims.

Agent Orange- The Atrocities of War

Click link to read more

Be warned, the photos yielded by an agent orange search on the internet are horrifying, I have posted some below. But it matters to realize:

This is why 2017 is now the sixth consecutive year for the worldwide marches against Monsanto. Because they have infiltrated the EPA, the agency that is supposed to regulate these companies to protect people from corrupt agendas at the cost of our lives and well-being, they have bullied farmers, ruined lives, all with a brutal pursuit for profit without concern for the disruption of our health and even our genetic code. This statement is taken from the March Against Monsanto website:

http://www.march-against-monsanto.com/press-release/

"WORLDWIDE–Hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens will hit the streets May 20th, 2017 for the 6th international March Against Monsanto grassroots campaign. The global events will take place in hundreds of cities on six continents with the objective to further educate and raise awareness about Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds and the increasingly toxic food supply. A focal point of this year’s events is Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, which has been detected in air and rain samples, the breast milk of nursing mothers, childhood vaccines, prenatal vitamins, and baby formula."

In 2011 right out of college at Florida State University, I lived in Tallahassee Florida and I became an intern for Sustainable Tallahassee. I worked under Executive Director Sharon Liggett and I did research on various topics. Tallahassee is Florida's state capital, but it is a small city with a fluctuating populace, businesses have a cap on patrons that shifts based on whether people are in school or in session. So the Green Sector is a great boon to providing a new economic stability for the city. The smaller size also means it is possible to have better city planning incorporating innovative new sustainable technologies and architecture into the city design. It was a dream position for me. But a lot of what I researched was assigned to me about health effects. Particularly a report on PERC, Perchloroethylene, a dangerous chemical used in dry cleaners that seeps into us and the environment, as well as a report on breast milk, that disturbed me deeply. As I worked on it I realized the way women's breast milk creates their baby's immune system naturally has lead to a build up of toxic chemicals that are getting more concentrated with each generation over the last couple hundred years, and we are now passing the alarming parts per billion to have unknown consequences in my generation. This knowledge would come back to me after I began working on the beginning of the Miami Marches.

It was historic to be a part of that time. I was engaged originally because a friend of mine who was one of the people leading the first meeting needed help. She was very much the epitome of the wise midwife, the Earth based sage, the healer and mother and grass roots organizer. She was pregnant and needed to step back for herself so I stepped forward. I am very glad to know such a brave world changing woman.

That first meeting was quite the hallmark, many key players meeting for the first time in what would become a huge effort of great motivated force. That was the day I met Aaron Spence, and he pushed to set up a Miami March, not just a Ft. Lauderdale one. He would plan the march route and pull the permits with many opposing hoops to jump through. It became his life like breathing, and a great vision of making and working together with many powerful innovative people like ourselves, young and educated and ready for change. Some included Melissa Vallecillo on the fundraiser, Bruce Stanley as an organizer for the campaign, Nina Marie as shirt designer for fundraising, Angelica Ramirez as an organizer, these are some of my friends I worked closely with and still do for different reasons, there were legion organizers and volunteers. It was amazing and the most successful campaign I worked on as the young adults were social media versed and great with personal energy to get the word out, find support, venues, and outreach. I think the great moment when Aaron spoke at the rally was a high point, he had done so much and faced pressure like never before, and later faced many hard moments of decision and difficulty that take a rising of the spirit to push through, and to make the final day happen. The perseverance that takes place behind the scenes to make great things possible are often forgotten. I leave out so many sagas here! But we did it, all of us, and I got to witness those moments when a person faces down all their own limits to do something that seemed impossible. It made me stronger to get to do that myself. It was like focus through birth pains, the effort to give birth to a new world. We labored hard, the work was long, and there was a joy in its fire.

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses- A History of Women Healers - released by the Feminist Press at CUNY in 1978                                              https://www.marxists.org/subject/women/authors/ehrenreich-barbara/witches.htm

Agent Orange Article-                                                                    http://www.theamericansixties.com/agent-orange.html

  Seeding Fear documentary promoted by musical performer Neil Young-                                             http://www.music-news.com/news/UK/91064/news 

Walk For Future Generations- 80 Mile Walk Across the Everglades in 6 Days

When I headed to the Everglades last weekend I knew it would be important for me to get to see the land and shinning water and I looked forward to the walk. I planned on attending the first day and being prepared for more. I did not know how much more would be coming. 

Betty Osceola was our General, whipping us into shape, educating us about the land and reality we were facing with the development we had come to take a stand against. She also taught us about the power of our focus, our inter-connectedness, and our effect on each other as well as the need for us to listen. To really listen, something our fast-paced lives and talkative habits made a seemingly distant hope. What was really amazing about this walk, was how it grounded us, and by its end I think we found a greater power together. We found the "we" instead of "I" and in silence found a shift of awareness. We became aware of all the conscious life around us we normally pass by, being deaf to its messages. And as Betty said, we thought we came to save the Everglades and the land's native people. Instead, we were the ones who were saved.  We have to be healed ourselves before we can heal the world.

That first day dawned a miracle in my life. I have been lost in grief like I have never known before. It swallows me whole and smothers me down. I feel like the dead walking when I have to act like all is well. The truth is, it isn't. It hasn't been. I am at the "peak" of my life and feel so beaten I have felt old, like it ended just as it was starting. Grief can take many forms. The worst is the death of yourself. A living one. Unknown, unrecognized. Dead bones walking.

Betty says that we live surrounded by dead things. Cement, asphalt, concrete. I notice, when I go to streets all covered by pavement. There is a cold and creepy hallowness. Far from "The Architecture of Happiness". Things seem more threatening, people more likely to be dangerous. This is usually very true in my experience. The wealthy and well adjusted tend to be surrounded by beautiful trees, stately lawns. Even so, my own walls are a habit I usually have no reason to question. Betty said, walking and being surrounded by life each day, was going to detoxify us. I am amazed by how much she was right, and the way in which I became more aware. Deafness. I feel a physical awareness of the amazing life forms around me as I have not before. I always loved being outside. But we were learning something words on a paper cannot convey to you. Only being in life can give it to you like that.

That day, when I was first shown what my home really is, it was like the earth, the Everglades, was embracing me. I gasped in air realizing a cavernous feeling had been dwelling in my chest. I didn't naturally feel like breathing deeply in my day to day life. The air was so alive and fresh it opened me up, a fresh gasp found its way into my lungs. I physically felt life touch what had not been exuberant enough in me before, a lack of desire to breath deeply happens when your will and joy for life is smothered. In that breath, it was like life had showed up for me. Here. All of it, just by the miracle of its subtle beauty all around me. I couldn't even feel as much a part of it until I was in it, the difference of rolling down the window, and having the wind and water blowing past my every inch. It was like a baptism, a cleansing by wind, light, water, motion. 

My friend Houston allowed me to join a private tour of his home in the waterways and tree islands. It was because of him that I found myself on this air boat, learning a new awareness of respect and the reality of the water, and how its high levels effected the delicate tree islands and the people who live off the landscape.  I can't say what it meant to discover the joy of just feeling alive all over again. Some tears are beautiful for the release of finally getting to feel right. To feel at home. To feel nurtured by the very light around you. By the wind whipping past, grass and birds and sky. 

We stopped for a moment of silence. As an example of my "monkey mind" I was enjoying it, then suddenly worried my phone could go off. So even though it didn't, the thought was loud in my head and I didn't stay connected with the quiet. I think my mind is so used to jumping around and distraction, it found something to fill the unusual gap from noise. I didn't realize til the week ended, that that moment of silence out on the water would truly be the only one. Because even as I walked 80 miles across the Everglades, it was next to a road tearing by with noise. Truckers supporting our efforts blew horns so loud I felt like I would jump out of my skin. People flew past, music stations blasting, much like I have enjoyed doing on the straight open road, carrying my own little world across the landscape at full throttle. Even when at one of our stops I was amazed by a beautiful boardwalk through ancient cypress, the road murmured. Even at the camp, the wash of cars passed us, like they have next to my house ever since I can remember. The roads grow in all my private spaces, getting louder, bigger, making more deafness to all that disappears in their paths. And I realized after returning home, the only time I was away from a road's presiding over the noise in the background, was that moment when Houston turned off the engine. Realizing that, I find is a bit sobering now. What quiet will be left? It is only in quiet that the softest voices can be known. It was meeting these living voices I usually take for granted that has really stayed with me after Betty's walk. Our walk.

Each day we would walk 15 miles, and once we finished we took the support vans back to the center camp. We got to feel more and more like a tribe, everyone in it together. At night we sat at the council fire, and in his quiet and wise way of waiting, we would become slowly aware of the signal of Bobby C. Billie. Our elder, a carrier of wisdom and heart medicine, of the earth's medicine. He watched us and recognized our ails and dysfunctions,  and above all I think, he and Betty were teaching us the medicine of realizing the importance of messages in our actions, the need to be more conscious of what is respectful treatment, and above all, that we, ourselves, are important. We are the link for all life to come. And they showed us how to listen. 

Western culture and TV seem to teach us not to take much seriously. I think even our own importance. Betty said if you knew how to respect yourself, you would know how to respect me. How to respect life. This seems really true. I think if we were to get vulnerable, and get brave, and really ask ourselves if we think we are important, most people don't. Betty said in 30 years of educating kids on her own air boat tours, she's asked them this question. Raise your hand if you think you are important. She says over all those years, at the start of her tour, the children of every grade, age, and background, do not raise their hands. After her tour, when she shows them how much effects the land, how much one piece matters, and shows them that they are the link to all the future generations getting to have this too- when she asks them then, raise your hand if you think you are important, most all of them do. Some are still afraid to claim it. Well this walk showed me my suffocated voice, my pain in feeling silenced, is justified. Because I am important. Because we are on the brink now and what we are fighting to save is ourselves. I'd like for my grandchildren to have a land called Florida that is not under ocean water, or paved into dead zones because people thought they could destroy such precious life systems, and then copy what they never understood was irreplaceable.

"Mitigate" Betty said. That is a bad word as she put it. Because it is the magic eraser governing bodies or companies use to dismiss the damages that are done to our natural systems. You can't take the main sewer line and break the pipe, and stick a plank over the mess just to cross it, and look the other way and act like that did something about it just because you don't want to deal with the shit that's rising. You may want to act like you don't notice the stink, but eventually the bilge builds up, until it carries the plank away and you along with it. I'd rather avoid the shit storm, thank you very much. And that is exactly where we are sending ourselves right now. 

Someone said to me there are so many causes to pick from you can't help them all. Somehow I feel like I am starting to see a bigger picture with a somewhat different conclusion. I think all kinds of seemingly disconnected world problems are united and we need to address the whole picture. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, this is why you are important. One person maybe can't fix all the problems of the world. But each person in the world is somehow connected to every world problem. Each person knows by their experience what feels wrong, what they did not like, what deserves to be better. Usually when an oil owner, or politicians make a far reaching call that devastates many people, they do it because it is all from a distance. It is easy to think the River of Grass Greenway sounds like a nice idea, a green bike path through the Everglades, until you walk the every mile next to the road and discover what can't be noticed driving by at 70 miles an hour. How far out the marker of the Department of Transportation Right of Way reaches, that the land they conveniently claim is disturbed is in fact pristine by two feet from the roadway. That the survivors left in the too quiet wilderness that rest in water and protected buttonwoods and mangroves would be paved and filled, the beauty of the water channels ripped out and the water that already shows the stilling of its southward flow would be damned even more. 

One of the most powerful days was when we stopped for the press moment. Funny, just like when I was an organizer for March Against Monsanto Miami when it began here in 2013, there wasn't any press that showed up much. When I did the Monsanto work, we got one reporter, I think Channel 6. They didn't air anything, they made a short article online. They got the numbers wrong, making it sound small, 200-300 people, when my friend who oversaw so much to make it possible used a counter and counted almost 1,900 people. This was similar. I think I saw someone from Channel 10 at a stop once. But this day, the press was supposed to come Betty said, and none did. Too bad, it would have made for great contrast and dramatic TV. Sometimes what is most noticeable is what is missing.

That day we stopped and set up signs about protecting our water and stopping the River of Grass Greenway or ROGG. We were in front of a gate that really has no place being in the Big Cypress Preserve. It was the entrance to an oil refinery. Bobby C. Billie and Betty said that the Everglades has recently become the largest land deal in American history for oil extraction. As part of this, massive 30 ton trucks that emit seismic vibrations will be used to locate oil deep underground, crushing the delicate interweave of surface matter that keeps the River of Grass alive in the dry season and all the things that live inside it. Just to get a sense of the parks' priorities, the oil truck entered the gate, two armed rangers let it pass, and with our protesting and signs such a threat to them, they took an aggressive stance with their weapons and stood behind their truck doors, using them like a shield! For crying out loud, really? A bunch of walkers with nothing but their voices and signs and feet. We laid on the grass to catch a break, some people had babies with them. Betty walked over to a sign that was "talking to her" as she put it. And did it ever have something to say. 

It said this land was for the people, and Betty pointed out we had the right to go where the rangers were standing with guns defending an oil truck. What are they really supposed to be defending? The parks have a few responsibilities and often it has to do with roads and in may places milling timber. But really the responsibility is to us, the people, and as a world heritage site, to the world's people. They don't want people seeing these activities it seems, because they know these actions don't sit right. People won't be so thrilled to see all this. How much does the pay grade of the six companies that now own all our media channels get effected by the trail of money, "Big Oil" the industry not having to pay the atrocious costs of their water use and damage by the millions of gallons each day just to cool facilities, the dumping and death of oil spills like the one in the Gulf that moved across the Earth's ocean gyres, the trash and plastic bags filling our oceans, the emissions overheating our atmosphere and melting our ice caps, their repression and buying up of our best chances of survival by repressing the green inventions that have already replaced their damning and outdated industry, and the over-extraction of the planet's resources such as what they are doing right now behind that fence. 

Like Betty said, if you knew how to respect yourself, you would know how to respect life. If you could really comprehend no glass tower can keep you from the fallout of this Jenga game, all the pieces standing stacked on each other as we rip the support from the foundations at our own expense, we would stop. We could shift this planet into a green and sustainable system quickly. We have the factory power, the technology, the inventions, the ideas, and the people to do it. We just haven't got really that this is a game of Russian roulette and the barrel is pointed at us. All of us.

When the Great Depression happened President FDR made jobs through road building in the national parks. What we aren't seeing is we have the best job boom facing us humanity has ever had. To save our species, technicians are needed with a great incentive, industry based on the best possible products instead of planned obsolescence. Best, taking into account their materials full range of real impact. Right now oil would be under if it had to pay real cost. By not letting money represent true cost, which would mean not only profit but also the real losses of the resources it represents, we have turned a tool of organization, money, into a feint game. And the distraction is breaking down the entire system of value, and our living system, that supports our first and only value, life.

Now we still use roads to make money. But like elders say, one day you will realize you can't eat money. You can't breath money. You can't drink money. In fact it can mean nothing if people realize it doesn't represent anything anymore. In the Great Depression it could be used for lighting a fire. There is another use for it.

Money isn't bad. But thinking everything is about money, when money is just a metaphor for EVERYTHING ELSE, is. The things we actually value to have a good life, the resources and services and home environment it takes to live well, these are what we reprsent with money, to make exchange easier. But if you screw all that up and don't have much left to exchange, a mansion won't matter at the bottom of the sea, or if radiation kills you, or if you can't go outside because the air poisons you. You'd think it is obvious, but instead of letting the obvious be obvious, and having leaders put on their big boy pants and deal with what is the new threat or issue, our leaders have often buried their heads in the sand because what is really happening calls for a bigger kind of action that is inconvenient for the status quo. For the work on all that has set up the money to flow one way without hindrance of collateral damage to slow down the train of "Our interest over Theirs".

We all have a common interest to survive, to live, to get to continue, to get to live where your family before you was born, to get to have your children know it too if that is what you wish. 

Forcing. I see a lot of forcing. Forcing smaller voices that want their right to live, like plants, animals, the earth systems, to be destroyed for a game of profit we made up. We can see our bigger priorities now. We can play a better game.

See, what I get is a picture. And now that I have walked from the eastern side of my homeland to its western ocean, that picture is alive for me as it was not before. I used to teach as a tour guide at the Deering Estate at Cutler. A beautiful museum at the meeting place of ancient tribal lands, war and resistance and unconquered spirit of the native people fighting for their right to exist. What a place, where industry of America's hard working backbone and big money such as Charles Deering's wealth and status from manufacturing tractors and steel meets the respect of the beautiful and rare wilderness.  I love that place and it was probably my most important job for what it revealed to me. 

I taught guests about its history. A wealthy industrialist bought a development to make it his estate, and even more, to preserve the landscape he saw as rare as the Amazon. It is the best example of what "trickle down" economics is supposed to mean. Only thing is, how many people get what money represents so well as Charles Deering did? He used its mass representation of all our resources, to actually preserve something that is for all of us. He loved the land, and only when you love a thing can you understand it. To understand, is to love. If you understood deeply what you are, the joy of it in your connection to all these different forms of life that make yours possible, you could know, as an oil CEO, that Gulf water is your own insurance policy. This River of Grass, is the Kidney of the Earth's system. this really is an active and accurate metaphor. It has a function.

Tour guide talk- all this land in south Florida, well you see the rocks have holes in them like a sponge. Because each piece of the land is a filter. It cleans the water, and makes the purest water, some of the best in the world. Most of the water in the world is salty. Here, a miracle happens. All of this state is a sophisticated network for water purification with a cost to replicate that is near incalculable. How much for one water treatment building? Now imagine that covering all of this state. It is amazing.

More of a tour guide picture- So holes. I lived in North Florida near its border, in the capital called Tallahassee. I would swim in the springs up there when it was hot. What is left of them. They have been dwindling over my lifetime. They are so clean and clear and beautiful, the best part of summer. that water goes south, it all goes south. Water doesn't make boundaries. It crosses them. It's all we've got. And it circulates. The rain and land make it fresh for us to drink. We didn't used to have treatment facilities, we had marshes and mountains, snow and streams that were pristine by their own astonishing power, by gentle stages, all effecting each other. And it is this that flows through the holes of the limestone.

These holes in Florida's limestone give way to underwater caves and massive areas we call aquifers. like a lifeblood below the surface. And midway Lake Okeechobee is the big powerhouse, fueling the Everglades, which is not a square at the tip of the state even if that is what it shows on our maps. It is a continuous spilling pathway of millions of acres of "shinning water" as the Miccosukee describe it. And when I worked at Deering, I researched for them. One of the things that I treasure was reading the written records of Spanish Explorers and the first American settlers describing the way it looked, and the gallons of water that thrust this clean water into the bay. It make a perfect mixture of fresh and salt water for the birthing place of fish and marine life, and the food was abundant. I wish I could have seen it like that.

See, I don't want my children to read my own descriptions and to think, I wish I could have seen it like that... and I hope they can be ancestors one day, so others get the chance to see.

Tour Guide Talk continued- the fresh water is what protects Florida since it is porous, and rock is not a barrier. The fresh water is what keeps salt out, and that means the marshes keep our land balanced and dry too. 

More talking points... We have been in an unusually stable period of earth's history during mankind's development. The planet has had a completely different atmosphere, it was thanks to the renaissance of plants that oxygen was established. The earth can be a very different environment and adjust. It has been much hotter and we would not survive that now, but the earth would just change. Change is a part of the earth's history. Florida itself is a transitional landscape. The shifting of ice caps changes the shape of its coastlines.  It has been a desert, much wider than this, covered by water. It is a very low continental shelf on the east coast. 

So, now that I walked it, and I personally saw all I used to talk about up close and for myself, I see those words differently. This was a walk for future generations. The Everglades is a liver for all the world. As Bobby C. Billie said, if the Everglades go, it is the mark for the rest of us. Human beings have kept our position because we have adapted to change. That means paying attention, listening, getting creative, and taking action to preserve our lives. The only way we save ourselves is by getting in gear everywhere. All of it, we need all of it. We need each other. It is too big for one person. But we are not alone. We are in the same boat. It is a little blue ball spinning on the edge of a great disk of stars, and it knows how to heal itself, and us. We think we know so much, and that is precisely when we can't learn. You've got to get there is so much that we don't see yet, so let's not throw it away. Cause we are really just throwing our own delicate place in this amazing picture away when we do that. We need to recognize the value of our own lives. The profoundness of what chance it is to live, and to listen, because this is it. This moment. Get it. Understand. Love this moment, love this life, learn how to have respect for your life so you can feel the greatness and fullness that gives you. It was in feeling this that I felt the miracle of getting to be me. Of getting to be here. Life is so simple. Life is so pure. All you have to do is breath. And you will receive the gift of love that really is your life.

It was in silence that I woke up to all I was deaf to. That's my hope and prayer for us all. Please, see me. See what is worth it. See where real value is, before we destabilize what never needed our help to work, it just needed us to let it be left alone. Beauty is not to be exploited, abused, or destroyed. It is to be respected. To be approached carefully, because things, like the systems of nature that are beautiful, are not toys novelties, or needless. Nothing is pointless in nature. In anything. It is all important. Beauty is a pattern that is the highest evolved. That is what attracts us. Respect it. Understand. It's right to exist unmolested and undestroyed protects yours.