Even though my official walks for this uphill battle fundraiser are done I did another walk today! It was gorgeous weather here in San Francisco, even in the Outer Richmond, where it was very foggy this morning. We’ve raised $808 so far ($40 more since week 8)! Can you help me reach my $1,000 goal? I am only $192 short of this goal! I very much appreciate the support I have already received both financially and otherwise! It’s not too late to donate either – I will appreciate the reward for a walking goal met! You can either donate online (just click on the button to the left), send a check to AtMP (P.O. Box 320151, Brooklyn NY 11232), or give me a check (or cash) next time you see me. We’re almost there! It’s like having to walk up the last 192 inches to reach the top of the hill!

To go back to my weekly updates please click here where you also can find out what all this walking is about…

Today was my last official walk for this uphill battle fundraiser! And what a day to do this on: It was gorgeous weather here in San Francisco, an unusual occurrence in July when it usually is foggy. We’ve raised $768 so far! This is $232 short of my goal but still a very nice sum! Thank you to all of you who supported me financially and otherwise (you know that I would’ve snug out and taken the bus home a few times )! I very much appreciate it! And it’s not too late to donate either – I will appreciate the reward for a walking goal met!

Two things were different today: I carried a heavier load home (shoes and laptop) and I walked with a friend. We had some great conversations from religion to spirituality to relationships and alternatives to marriage. It was a very nice change of pace to be able to talk to a live person rather than listening to podcasts! I don’t have a podcast to review, so this’ll be a short note.

To go back to my weekly updates please click here where you also can find out what all this walking is about…

As if I had planned it that way, I did my 7th uphill walk on the 7th day of the 7th month…. We’ve raised almost $600 (we’re – appropriately – $7 short)! We got $400 more to go to reach my goal of raising $1,000 to support the work of the Alternatives to Marriage Project. If you haven’t done so already, you can donate online or give me a check or cash. If you’ve done so already thank you!

I learned today that I don’t find all Against the Grain podcasts interesting. I started out with one that sounded interesting – talking about how US consumers have supported the US empire – but when I realized that I was more interested in beating up Muni because buses were passing me every minute or so, I decided it was time to switch. First, a little about the buses, though. Some of my walk is along a bus route. I was passed by 7 buses of the same route going the same direction in about 30 minutes! Frequent bus service? No. Bad planning. 4 of those buses were literally back to back! Okay, sorry, I just had to get this little rant in… On to the podcast. I switched to a talk by Ruth Wilson Gilmore on the prison industrial complex. Some of the things that I especially enjoyed hearing related to Gilmore’s emphasis on the need for analysis before we “raise our fists.” “Analysis,” she said, “and dismantling or reconfiguring a system are inseparable activities.” (Yes, I stopped to write that down…). “We have to analyze to make the change. [...] Analysis is necessary to political action.” I wonder if that’s what’s often missing with today’s political action – there isn’t a lot of system analysis going on. I cannot imagine a movement for same-sex marriage if there had been an analysis of marital privilege, for example. We’d be dismantling marriage instead.

Gilmore sets out to explain the astonishing increase of the prison population by looking at the political culture of the US. Prison population grew from about 280,000 in the early 1980s to 2.3 million in 2008. What political culture is behind this large increase? According to Gilmore, there are three features within the American political culture that are supporting this dramatic increase:

1. The state is strong with a default legitimate state of “the racial state.” That is the state controls based on race.
2. “A man was not born to run away” epitomize the certain kind of masculinity has been normalized. British Common Law suggested that the masculine thing to do was to honor the duty to retreat. This normalizes the notion that “the key to safety is aggression.”
3. The US goes to war often. There is a high correlation between governmental activities, such as war, and crime: “Every time the US goes to war and wins, the homicide rate goes up.” So, “the State models behavior for the people.”

Gilmore integrates this analysis of the political culture with her critique of the “prison industrial complex,” which includes providing the background on this term. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to find out what she says because it’ll be difficult to summarize her arguments since she is presenting a summary of the reasons that have been put forth for the increase in the prison population and then debunks each one. It is very condensed already. You can also find some of her arguments here and of course in her book.

I would like to summarize a point she made, though, about coalition building: To connect people and issues. In order to build coalitions, we need to start seeing the connections between the various topics. For example, prison expansion impacts the environment negatively, thus people fighting against environmental destruction might be willing to help stop prison expansion. The academic equivalent of coalition building is interdisciplinary work. This can help us with analytically grounded political action.

The full talk Gilmore gave at Evergreen State College is available as streaming media. Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a transcript.

To go back to my weekly updates please click here where you also can find out what all this walking is about…

This is a rather timely interview given the Obama administration’s decision to keep some of the Guantanamo detainees indefinitely. According to McClintock, only 8% of the detainees at Guantanamo have even been accused of being linked to Al Qaeda! The vast majority of detainees are neither terrorists nor enemy combatants; many of them are innocent; some of them are family members of Al Qaeda members held in violation of the Geneva Convention.

McClintock argues that the combination of power with fear created an atmosphere of paranoia that lead to two wars and the acceptance, even encouragement of torture. She gives as one example Dick Cheney who was one of the most powerful VPs in US history. Yet after 9/11, he was convinced that more attacks would be imminent; he saw threats of attacks everywhere. What happened on 9/11 tremendously fueled the paranoia. Here we were, the only superpower, and a handful of men with boxcutters were able to shut down the whole country. Congress was evacuated. The airlines were grounded. Everything had come to a halt. Yet, the men who brought us to our knees had evaporated. They went up in the same flames as the towers. So there was no one left to publicly force to answer for the crimes committed. We needed to show that we were still strong by humiliating someone else: Osama Bin Laden. Since we failed to get our hands on him – probably due to incompetence – others had to stand in as those to be blamed. Torture victims are a result of this desperate attempt to regain the power we felt we had lost on 9/11. This was (is?) the overarching climate. On the ground level, at Abu Ghraib, torture was enabled by a similar power-fear mixture. Although McClintock stresses that it is vital not to forget that the torture happened because it was encouraged by the Bush administration without this mixture it might not have been carried out. Normal prisoner to guard ratios are around 4 to 1; at Guantanamo, they are almost 1 to 1; at Abu Ghraib they were 75 to 1! Here is a prison in the heart of hostile territory, exposed to attacks, and the guards are far outnumbered. A recipe for fear! Yet, the guards are part of an elite military from the most powerful nation. Power. Fear. Leads to paranoia. Torture has been used by empires past – from the Spanish Inquisition to Hitler – to disempower the torture victims, to put them back into their place.

There are two arguments presented to counter the claims for responsibility by the leaders of the US government for the torture. The first is the “few bad apples” argument debunked by Philip Zimbardo among many. The second I hadn’t heard before: The torture was a result of the influence of pornography. This was automatically disarming the torture because it becomes harmless, almost playful, like pornography. It also removes any responsibility from the higher-ups after all pornography did it. Now I wish I could refresh my memory with the article! Unfortunately, it costs $15, which is a bit too steep of a price… Well, let’s switch gears a bit. I’ll add more if I can get the article through a library.

The Alternatives to Marriage Project blog is sporting two interesting posts that I’d like to share to finish up this week’s uphill battle post. The first note brings together voices that are calling to move away from the single focus on same-sex marriage. The other describes a recent action alert that went to AtMP members asking Obama to go beyond supporting couples by stating that

All federal employees should be allowed to put one adult on their health plan along with their children. At a minimum, benefits should go to both different-sex and same-sex partners of government employees.

Of course the truly couplemania-free health care solution is universal health care but this 1+ option would allow singles by choice (like me) to add another adult, like a good friend or relative, to our health insurance. That certainly would be a step in the right direction!

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Today, I split my walk because I had an appointment at the RunSafe clinic on Divisadero and Sutter, a bit more than half-way home (and after the three major hills). Even though I don’t run, they were happy to work with me to ensure that I walk safely, i.e., work on those postural habits that eventually cause injuries. And that was exactly my goal: Given all the stuff I love to do on my feet – walking, hiking, and folk dancing – I have to take care of them! I confirmed some suspicions and learned some new things: My right leg is weaker than my left and my hips are tight and weak (I didn’t know the latter). And my head protrudes forward as if it were trying to get ahead of the rest of my body, probably a habit acquired thanks to sitting in front of the computer too much.

Part of the assessment was a video-taped gait analysis. That was rather humbling: I was read in my face and there was a lot of flubber jiggling around… Well, I knew that I had an uphill battle to get in shape! I do have pretty good and consistent race walking form. I bet I’ll be able to walk faster once I’ve loosened & strengthened my hips.

I also got some nutritional advice. I’ve heard & read many times about more frequent meals but it never seemed to apply to me. But when the nutritionist pointed out that this stabilizes my blood sugar, I realized with a jolt that this is why I get home tired! I haven’t eaten for six hours. So, I am going to try to spread things out more and see what happens. It would be nice not to have to take naps when I come home (I might still choose to).

I didn’t listen to any podcasts today, just music. So, this is a short update today. Plus, I want to go out and walk early tomorrow morning to work on that flubber…

Addendum from June 30: I reviewed the material that the RunSafe clinic sent me and I am not too impressed. It’s put together rather sloppily – spelling mistakes (“study chair” instead of “sturdy chair,” for example) and the section on nutrition has nothing to do with what I discussed with the nutritionist at the clinic. Since this is what I’ll keep from the clinic, I would have thought that they would put as much effort into it than the actual clinic… Disappointing!

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I listened to an interview with Tommi Avicolli Mecca and Paola Bacchetta as they remember the radical activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Mecca just edited a book – “Smash the Church, Smash the State” – that contains essays from radicals like Bacchetta as they recount their experience with the forming gay liberation movement and how that morphed into the acceptable gay rights movement. Bacchetta has some very harsh things to say about the exclusive fight for gay marriage – when the LGBT community is hurting on so many other issues. Mecca puts some numbers behind Bacchetta’s outrage. Numbers like 40% of the homeless youth in San Francisco identify as LGBT; similar numbers hold nationwide. Unemployment and poverty are quite common in the community. Yet, the mainstream LBGT organizations spent $43.3 million to try to defeat Prop 8 (and now they’re at it again trying to overturn it).

The shift from radicalism to mainstream happened in part because people wanted to feel “normal.” And the reformist ideas took hold in the LGBT community in part by getting media attention because they were more palatable to the rest of society than the radical parts of the community that wanted a different kind of society. It is quite an uphill battle to change deep-seated attitudes within society, especially couplemania! Radical groups that lived in truly democratic communes lost stamina, maybe exhausted from fighting everything. Even the radical Bacchetta is now a professor at UC Berkeley, though listening to her, at least her tongue is still pretty sharp! Mecca still questions everything, according to his website. So, maybe radicalism can be transformed without giving up the ability to critique oppressive social norms and institutions.

Of course, given my interest in “singles issues,” I began speculating what a radical singles movement would do. The gay liberation front started with Stonewall (at the time, it was illegal to dispense alcohol to homosexuals!). What splash could start a fight for equality for all and really mean all? Of course, Stonewall wasn’t planned. Singles are certainly not treated as badly as gays then (well, as far as I know at least). Yet, couplemania and matrimania are costing us a lot – both economically and emotionally. We spend a ton of money, for example, trying to find The One and then once we found him/her on the wedding… And lots of us, me included, have ended up in unhealthy and unhappy intimate relationships because we thought coupling was our only option. I do think that it’s time to create a new society – what we currently have isn’t working and it’s certainly not life-affirming nor sustainable. This new society would affirm all ways of relating not just certain types of relationships.

To go back to my weekly updates please click here where you also can find out what all this walking is about…