Lucinda Marshall

Tag Archive for Lucinda Marshall

Sunday Morning Talk Show Fantasy Guest Lineup, Women Talking About Syria Edition

September 7, 2013 / Lucinda / Comments Off

Some people have fantasy football teams. I have fantasy Sunday morning talk show guest panels that are made up entirely of women. These are my picks for my fantasy panel, Syria edition.

As U.S. posturing on Syria has escalated, the media has trotted out old white guy after old white guy as “experts”, never mind many of them are the same men who lied to us about chemical weapons in Iraq and then commenced to bomb the Iraqis with all manner of chemical weapons which left a horrifying epidemic of cancer, birth defects and death in that country and have backed U.S. policies that have contributed to the current situation in Syria and Middle East unrest in general.

I think most of us are supremely tired of listening to these guys and of a media that simply parrots the talking points of U.S. military domination.

Imagine if instead they presented a balanced view that brought in people who articulate alternative visions and oh what the heck, how about we just kick all the men out and listen to women for a change.

So for the benefit of the media, here are some voices you ought to be including as commentators in your coverage of Syria:

1. Sarah Van Gelder writes in Yes! Magazine that, “there are at least six strategies that could hold wrongdoers to account, deter war crimes of all sorts, and build peace”:

Bring those guilty of atrocities to justice
Call for a United Nations embargo on arms, military supplies, and logistical support for both Damascus and opposition forces
The U.N. Security Council should hold an international peace conference
Offer aid and support to the nonviolent movements within Syria
Provide the humanitarian aid desperately needed by the millions of displaced people
Force the hand of Russia and China in the Security Council

2. The women’s human rights organization MADRE similarly calls for the Obama Administration to:

Stop the flow of weapons into Syria
Renew focus on diplomacy to end the conflict
Increase humanitarian aid to the region

3. The Nobel Women’s Initiative (who unlike President Obama, are using their status as Nobel Peace Prize winners to promote peaceful solutions) has put out a statement that reads:

The use of chemical weapons in Syria is a crime that cannot be ignored but bombing Syria is not the answer. Military intervention in Syria can only lead to more death and destruction, and further fuel the volatile situation in the region.

We applaud the vote of the UK’s Parliament against endorsing British involvement in attacks on Syria, and call upon the United States to step back from the brink of attacking yet another country in the Middle East/North Africa region. Such a move can only result in more hatred, more violence and more retaliation.

We call upon the UN Security Council to accept its responsibility to act in response to the use of chemical weapons in Syria instead of the ongoing posturing of its members based on their own self-interest instead of concern about the people of Syria.

We urge the Security Council to ensure the nonviolent resolution of this crisis within the ongoing crisis of the civil war in Syria. We call upon the Security Council to refer the matter to the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC).

We also call on the International Community to urgently convene the Syria Peace Conference, known as Geneva II, and to ensure women meaningfully participate. (emphasis mine)

4. Sonali Kolhatkar of KPKF’s Uprising radio program and Co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission writes,

Students of American imperial history do not have to look too far back to see the disastrous consequences of bombing dictatorial governments. As the debate over a US military strike on Syria heats up in Congress, American antiwar activists are clear in their opposition to the push for war. And they are correct to oppose any sort of military strikes if the long arc of destructive US foreign policy is to be trusted to remain the same.

5. Medea Benjamin points out that most Americans do not support the idea of bombing Syria.

6. Amnesty International looks at the problems of sexual harassment and forced marriages faced by Syrian women refugees.

7. The Women’s Media Center’s Women Under Siege has run a number of pieces about women in Syria.

The U.S. media owes its audience a fair and balanced representation of the issues, not just pro-war talking points and they need to include women’s voices and concerns as part of that discussion.

———-

Postscript–As several readers have pointed out, I left out the crucial voice of Phyllis Benis.

Shot On The 4th Of July

July 8, 2013 / Lucinda / Comments Off

There is a kindness meditation that I like to do every so often that involves putting your hand on your heart and sending kind thoughts to your loved ones, friends, neighbors, the people in your city and country and throughout the world. For whatever reason, I decided to do that particular meditation the morning of July 4th. Two seconds after I’d put my hand on my heart I realized the irony of doing that the same day that so many people participate in holiday rituals that involve putting their hands over their hearts and pledging allegiance to a flag that stands for a toxic definition of freedom and independence that requires ‘power over’ that can be held only through violence–quite the antithesis of my little kindness meditation–which after that realization felt all the more necessary albeit completely inadequate.

Then, over the weekend, I happened to meet Luiz R.S. Simmons who is a representative to the Maryland House of Delegates. He was at the farmers’ market asking people to sign a letter to Maryland Governor O’Malley asking him to close Maryland’s gun control loophole by funding a system that would facilitate law enforcement officials in confiscating guns which are illegally in the possession of those convicted of violent crimes. There is such a law in Maryland that allows law enforcement to do this, just not the funds to enforce it. Mr. Simmons estimates that it would cost $350,000 to set up the system with another $35,000 a year for personnel to run it.

As Nick Kristof pointed out in column published on the July 3rd,

All told, since 9/11, the United States has spent $8 trillion on the military and homeland security, according to the National Priorities Project, a research group that works for budget transparency. That’s nearly $70,000 per American household…
…The imbalance in our priorities is particularly striking because since 2005, terrorism has taken an average of 23 American lives annually, mostly overseas — and the number has been falling…
…Most striking, more than 30,000 people die annually from firearms injuries, including suicides, murders and accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. American children are 13 times as likely to be killed by guns as in other industrialized countries.

In Chicago alone, 72 people were shot over the July 4th weekend. The benefits of Mr. Simmons modest spending request should be abundantly obvious. Aside from the astounding number of people who are killed by guns in this country every year, in comparison to the cost of fighting terrorism, the amount needed to fund this proposal is chump change. Add to that the other costs of gun violence. If you suffer a serious but non-fatal gun wound, the hospital bill for just one person could easily be more than the amount Mr. Simmons is asking for. And then there are the lost earnings, the impact on families, the costs of prosecuting and imprisoning perpetrators who should never have had the weapons in the first place, etc. The cost is enormous in every possible way.

Over the weekend, EMC Insurance Cos. announced that they would not provide insurance for Kansas schools where teachers carry guns. Imagine if other insurance companies followed suit or refused health insurance to those who keep guns in their homes. Imagine laws requiring liability insurance for those who own guns (and insurance companies that refused to issue it). It would be a good economic move and save a lot of lives.

Corporate decisions like that and campaigns like Mr. Simmons’ in Maryland are very productive steps in getting the gun problem in this country under control.

And the next time you are asked to put your hand over your heart, pledge to send out kindness too.

Patriotism Reconsidered

June 30, 2013 / Lucinda / Comments Off

As the flags are waved and the parades marched this 4th of July, we would do well to consider the freedom and independence we claim to cherish and defend. In decidedly different ways, Edward Snowden’s leaking of NSA documents and Texas State Senator Wendy Davis’ filibuster have challenged us to think about what it means to stand up for what we believe in, in ways that don’t involve spending billions of dollars fortifying our borders, stopping and frisking without cause, arresting people for expressing their First Amendment rights in washable chalk, perpetually attacking other countries, the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and the highest per capita rate of gun ownership.

Bill Moyers reports that,

In just the six months since the Newtown killings there have been more Americans murdered by guns than the 4,409 United States armed forces killed in the Iraq war.

Aside from the fact that fighting spurious wars against other nations most decidedly makes us more vulnerable rather than safe, on our own streets and in our own homes, every day, we are waging war against ourselves.

Our military meanwhile censors news in defense of free speech and insists that maintaining the chain of command and good order trump legitimate prosecution of sexual assaults within the ranks, completely missing the point that the epidemic of personal violence being perpetrated by those who have sworn to protect us completely belies any semblance of a functional chain of command or good order.

At the same time, we have ignored both our own complicity in and the consequences of global warming. How is it that the President just got around to making a major speech on that subject?

Last week there was an insert in my PEPCO bill that informed me that 41% of my power came from coal, 18.6% came from gas, 34% came from nuclear and only 5.7% came from renewable sources. Meanwhile we are told that we must frack, never mind that it causes water to catch on fire and earthquakes, and we still don’t have a clue how to store nuclear waste (because the truth is it can’t be safely done) and we build tar sands pipelines through our farmland, wilderness and suburbs, and commit mountaintop mastectomies. Our air and land and water are polluted, wildfires rage and entire cities flood.

And too, we cut education spending, close schools and fire teachers, and saddle our college students with impossible debt. Even with “Obamacare” there will still be those who do not have insurance. In our legislatures and in Congress, a war is being waged against women’s reproductive rights. And retirement? Don’t even go there. And Wall Steet? Well it’s doing just fine.

That is the nitty gritty of the democracy for which we wave our flags. As Team America put it so eloquently, America, fuck yeah.

Josh Marshall (no relation) of Talking Points Memo makes the point that American democracy is dependent on secrecy as an integral part of its defense and questions whether breaking that secrecy (even when it exposes the abuse of that mandate) is acceptable,

Let me put my cards on the table. At the end of the day, for all its faults, the US military is the armed force of a political community I identify with and a government I support. I’m not a bystander to it. I’m implicated in what it does and I feel I have a responsibility and a right to a say, albeit just a minuscule one, in what it does. I think a military force requires a substantial amount of secrecy to operate in any reasonable way. (emphasis mine) So when someone on the inside breaks those rules, I need to see a really, really good reason. And even then I’m not sure that means you get off scott free. It may just mean you did the right thing…
…And I’m very skeptical of the notion that what Snowden did is awesome just because leaking state secrets is always a heroic act.

No question, America does indeed depend on secrecy. But as The New Yorker points out,

Snowden took classified documents from his employer, which surely broke the law. But his real crime was confirming that the intelligence agencies, despite their strenuous public denials, have been accumulating vast amounts of personal data from the American public.

Yes, precisely. And ask yourself this–Can you defend democracy with secrecy and spying or do those acts in fact completely undermine what you claim to hold dear?

Patriotism is a dangerous notion. It assumes the supremacy of the state that requires the constant exertion of ‘power over’ to maintain and the sanctity of borders that imply a damaging assumption of dominion and ownership which destroy any possibility of real freedom or democracy.

It’s time, past time, to reconsider what that flag we so proudly wave really represents and to stand up for the values that we hold dear.

Playing Bang Bang With A Pink Pistol (He Was Only Three Years Old)

February 5, 2013 / Lucinda / Comments Off

He was not a well regulated militia,

He was not defending himself

Against tyranny

Nor did he shoot in self-defense

He was just a three year old boy

Playing bang, bang you’re dead

With a pink pistol that

Turned out not to be a toy

And which now lies in his cold dead hands

That would make Charlton Heston proud.

It was an accidental shooting

According to the news.

But what is accidental about

A gun that is left in a toddler’s reach?

Will this keep you awake tonight, Wayne LaPierre,

Or will you be too busy wining and dining lawmakers

To be sure they don’t pass stricter laws and

Anyhow, the President went skeet-shooting–

Look kids, shooting can be fun.

Tmorej Smith was just a little boy

Who thought that the shiny pink gun was a toy,

And now he is dead,

And it isn’t a game anymore.

Will We Drown In Denial Or Face The Sea Change of Climate Reality

November 1, 2012 / Lucinda / Comments Off

Of all the searing images in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the one that I find most disturbing is this picture of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier which remained throughout the storm at great personal danger. That we must honor our military dead even at the risk of completely unnecessary loss of life speaks volumes about our priorities in this country.

I rarely watch cable news, but I found myself obsessively switching between a local news channel, CNN and The Weather Channel for much of the storm. There was much valuable and urgent information shared although much of it looked like a contest between reporters to see who could report while standing in the deepest water and stay standing (and I absolutely need to say that throughout the storm, I consistently found critical information being disseminated on Twitter well before I saw it on television). But not once did I hear any mention of the many nuclear power plants in the storm’s path, or a discussion of what to do if your house is flooded with toxic waste or the lack of plans to protect oil and gas facilities. No analysis of what climate change denial and inaction has cost us.

Nor was there mention of the fact that we’ve known that storms like this have been an event waiting to happen. Instead, as I pointed out a few days ago, we have continued to beat the drum in the fight against “terrorism”, pouring billions of dollars into destroying other countries, killing innocent civilians and creating conditions in which terrorism ferments and while we’re at it doing an ace job of brainwashing ourselves into being perpetually paranoid and terrified while at the same time allowing the infrastructure of our own country to go to hell.

As Chris Mooney pointed out in Grist, NASA warned about an event like Sandy in 2006:

Scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York have been studying that city’s vulnerability to hurricane impacts in a changing world, and calculated that with 1.5 feet of sea level rise, a worst-case-scenario Category 3 hurricane could submerge “the Rockaways, Coney Island, much of southern Brooklyn and Queens, portions of Long Island City, Astoria, Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens, lower Manhattan, and eastern Staten Island from Great Kills Harbor north to the Verrazano Bridge.

And of course, that wasn’t the only warning. WE KNEW IT COULD HAPPEN. And we did nothing. As a result we are now contending with this:

Consider what Kathy Waters, American Public Transportation Association vice president for member services had to say about the New York subway system,

The New York system, although there are some components that have been upgraded over the years, has a lot of antique components where the vendor has been out of business for 50 years. (emphasis mine)

And then there is this from NRDC’s Amy Mall:

Under the Clean Water Act, there is something called the Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC) rule which includes requirements for oil spill prevention, preparedness, and response to prevent oil discharges to navigable waters and adjoining shorelines…Sounds like a no-brainer. But in Fiscal Year 2011, EPA officials visited 120 sites oil and gas development sites and found 105 were out of compliance– 87.5%…Almost every single oil and gas site inspected lacked a mandatory spill prevention plan meant to protect our rivers and streams. (emphasis mine)

Internet, cable and phone services were also significantly disrupted and yet two days later with thousands of people still without access, I heard a report of a FEMA official telling people to file claims on the internet. And he expects people who are stranded in flooded buildings to do that how?

And,

Raw sewage, industrial chemicals and floating debris filled flooded waterways around New York City on Tuesday…

…The best officials could do was urge residents to steer clear of the contaminated waters.

Incidentally, they sent that warning out by email. To people who obviously were going to have trouble accessing their email.

The storm also precipitated numerous problems at various nuclear power plants, all of which are aging quickly past the lifespans they were designed for and some of which are the same design as the Fukushima facility in Japan,

Storm-related complications were blamed this week for forcing three nuclear reactors offline – Nine Mile Point Unit 1 northwest of Syracuse, N.Y., Indian Point Unit 3 about 25 miles north of New York City and the Salem plant’s Unit 1 on the Delaware River in New Jersey.

Meanwhile, rising waters along the Barnegat Bay prompted officials to declare an “alert,” the second-lowest in a four-tiered warning system, at Oyster Creek in New Jersey…

…NRC officials reported that other plants continued operating but reduced their electrical output as a precaution, including the Millstone plant’s Unit 3 reactor in Waterford, Conn., Vermont Yankee south of Brattleboro, Vt., and both reactors at the Limerick nuclear plant about 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia. The storm also appeared to knock out emergency sirens used to notify residents who live near the Oyster Creek and Peach Bottom plants in Pennsylvania, according to NRC reports. (emphasis mine)

These are the kinds of issues we need to confront if we are to stand a prayer of survival. They aren’t theoretical or in the future. They are real and they are right now. We need to see this as literally the moment for a sea-change in attitude. It is not acceptable for the media to continue to ignore climate change,

Last year at least 7,140 journalists and opinion writers published some 19,000 stories on climate change, compared to more than 11,100 reporters who filed 32,400 stories in 2009, according to DailyClimate.org…

…Particularly noticeable was the silence from the nation’s editorial boards: In 2009, newspapers published 1,229 editorials on the topic. Last year, they published less than 580 – half as many, according to DailyClimate.org’s archives.

And it is not acceptable for our politicians to continue to chest thump the drums of war while maintaining a deafening silence on climate change. Protecting symbols of military prowess while our cities drown isn’t honorable, it is an act of national suicide.

Speaking About Health Insurance Sunday Sept. 18

September 15, 2011 / Lucinda / Comments Off

This Sunday evening, September 18, I’ll be interviewed on A World Of Progress Radio in a segment devoted to health care issues. I’ll be talking about my experience trying to transfer an individual health insurance policy from one state to another and how the problems faced by individual policy holders with pre-existing conditions are not currently being addressed adequately by health care reform. This issue hits women particularly hard since they are less likely to be covered by an employer’s policy.

Other guests on the show include health insurance industry whistleblower Wendell Potter, Vanessa Beck of Healthcare Now and Mad As Hell Doctors.

The show will air at 7pm EDT. I’ll be interviewed beginning at 7:45.

To read more about my experience regarding this issue, please see my blog Pre-Existing Pundit.

My New Health Insurance Blog

August 29, 2011 / Lucinda / Comments Off

I’ve made several posts on Reclaiming Medusa regarding my experience of trying to move my health insurance from Kentucky to Maryland. In order to make it easier to follow those posts, I started a new blog devoted to that issue only so that those posts don’t get lost between other subject matter on this blog. The original posts on this blog have been cross-posted there and new posts have been added as well. The new blog is called Pre-Existing Pundit. Please spread the word!

Reclaiming Medusa (Again)

September 10, 2009 / Lucinda / One comment

Reclaiming Medusa was born in 2005 as one of my early attempts at blogging. I regretfully gave it up when I started the Feminist Peace Network (FPN) blog, because it was one project too many. It was a necessary choice, but at the time I promised myself I would eventually get back to it. And eventually is now.

The following is an updated version of the introductory essay I wrote for the original blog, along with a postscript. What I wrote in 2005, and the necessity of the spirit of Medusa, is even more true today than it was then:

I first crossed paths with Medusa at an Audrey Flack exhibit. It was of course the hair that caught my attention, I knew immediately that this was one Goddess who refused to be defined by revisionist mythology. Medusa means sovereign female wisdom and according to Alicia Le Van’s The Gorgon Medusa, her

“mask was used to guard and protect women and the secret knowledge of the Divine Feminine. It literally warned men to “Keep Away! Female Mysteries.” It was erected in stone,(corresponding to her look of stone), on caves and gateways at sacred sites dedicated to the Goddess.”

But of course Medusa’s power was incompatible with the myths of male power that were necessary to explain the rise of patriarchy and she had to be destroyed. La Van explains,

“The mythological beheading of Medusa symbolizes the ultimate silencing of female wisdom and expression. It is the act which stops her growth, limits her potential, movement and cultural contributions. She is obliterated and her severed head is flaunted on the Acropolis and other works of art in pride of her and all women’s subjugation by violent men. She is broken and her body enslaved. Her spirit, her mind, her spiritual powers are killed. Her once honored forces of female creativity and destruction are halted. Her role as dynamic mediatrix degraded. Her life-giving, death-wielding powers and wild forces of nature are controlled, tamed, and mastered by the male order. The cycles of life and nature are made to conform to his linear perspective.”

Not so metaphorically, in both global and very personal terms, we are living the fate of Medusa. Women in particular face a relentless struggle for economic empowerment. Violence, particularly against women and children is an escalating epidemic. The right of women to control their own bodies is under siege and the degradation of this planet with all manner of chemical and nuclear poison endangers our future. We are in danger when we question the patriarchal system from which dominating power and identity are derived and when we honor the wisdom, rights and lives of women. In the face of these threats to our existence, we need to continue to relentlessly tell our stories, name our needs and speak our truths. We need to reclaim the discussion.

Postscript: In recent months I have wanted to write about a number of topics that are somewhat outside the focus of the Feminist Peace Network blog. I believe passionately that the FPN blog should continue to focus primarily on misogyny and the intersection between violence and women’s human rights, so I intend Reclaiming Medusa to be a place to explore other topics that are not a good fit for FPN.

Before undertaking this project, I gave a lot of thought to simply posting to blogs on other sites, but if there is one thing I’ve learned over the last few years, it is that it is urgently necessary for women to have their own spaces in the ever-evolving media universe and I chose to be a part of that effort.

I’m not sure yet what the rhythm of this blog will be, probably less posts than FPN and some combination of quick hits to provide links to other things that should be read and lengthier pieces when I find the time, so be patient as I find the path and feel free to offer your thoughts, they are always welcome.

Go here to learn more about me, including contact info and check the links in the sidebar for copyright and comment policies. Be sure to join the Fan page I set up on Facebook for the blog, I’ll be posting some links there to things that I think might be of interest but that I’m not going to address on the blog.

**********

Feed your soul: Click here to learn more about Goddess symbolism.