ECONOMY AND WAR : Its the Economy OR the War!

There they go again! All those politicians, and pundits, pollsters, and, (as my friend Alan would say) presstitutes. They are all in this together sending us one mass message:

THE ECONOMY AND THE WAR HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER.

Apparently we, the public, have switched concerns. We are no longer worry about the war because now we are worried about the economy.

Well this may be so, but the mind manipulation coup here is to convince us that we must not connect the issues.

So lets see how well you have been brain washed. Which one of these issues is the war and which one is the economy? Remember CHOOSE ONE. If you choose both your answer will be nullified.

1. The young man or woman in your life signs up for duty in Iraq because there are no jobs at home.

WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________

2. The young veteran in your life is unable to find or afford care for his/her PTSD.

WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________

3. Despite a multi-trillion dollar budget with expanding military expenditures your elementary school has cancelled after school soccer due to lack of funds. You cannot afford childcare because your health premiums went up January 1st. Your child stays at home alone.

WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________

4. You lose your home due to a predatory lender jacking up your mortgage. The government tells you it would be unfair to provide relief for people who try to live beyond their means. Meanwhile they pay private contractors like Blackwater inflated fees for services that include murder and torture. You wonder who is the criminal, and who is irresponsible with their/our treasure.

WHEN THE POLLSTER CALLS AND ASKS," WHAT CONCERNS YOU MOST, THE WAR OR THE ECONOMY" YOU ANSWER_________

Reader: I have to go now. Please add your own test questions! Lets connect the dots and not let them blindside us into not seeing the causes of our hard times, and the true cost of war.


Anne Winkler-Morey Ph.D is an historian and itinerent professor. blog: " People's Living History"

MIDTOWN GLOBAL MARKET: The Global is Local

Coats, hats sweaters, scarves, snow pants, purses, packages of new purchases are piled high on the tiny table. Outside it is eleven below zero, before the wind-chill is factored in. In this inner city neighborhood Latinos and Africans and African Americans make up 65 percent of the population and European Americans, Asian American and Native Americans sharing the remaining third. Thawing out on this make-shift dance-floor in the window corner of the Midtown Global Market last Sunday, were small children and grandparents, professional dancers and first-timers, a panoply of body types, ages, races and ethnicities, gathered for free Salsa lessons.

The Midtown Global Market is not just a colorful place to come and chase the winter blues away. It is sweet revenge, the lemonade from lemons, the silver lining after a horrific storm, a picking up the scraps left by the ravages of globalization and making something beautiful out of them.

The Sears Tower was a mammoth department store and one of nine regional catalog mail order centers in the country back when Sears was the primary source for department store merchandise. Located adjacent to the corner of Lake Street and Chicago Avenue, in the center of South Minneapolis, it opened in 1928, employed 2000 people at its peak and was the central shopping site for everything from clothing to car parts for thousands of neighbors near and far. My spouse, who grew up in small towns in Wisconsin in the 1960s, remembers the excitement of coming to Sears on Lake Street once a year for major purchases. I bought expandable bras there over eighteen years ago, while pregnant with my now high-school senior. In 1993, one year before Sears moved its operations, we became a home owners in south Minneapolis and purchased an oven from the Lake Street store.

Sears left the Phillips neighborhood in South Minneapolis some fourteen years ago. They traded up, moving to the Mall of America in Bloomington where they could attract suburban shoppers who make substantially more than the residents of Phillips, where the average annual wage is $13,000. When Sears left, the neighborhood was already depressed. Since the start of the cocaine epidemic in the mid 1980s the primary economic activities here have been street drugs and women’s bodies.

In the 1980s, if you remember, the Reagan administration was funding mercenary forces and death squads in Central America, some with drug money that poisoned urban centers like the Phillips neighborhood in South Minneapolis. Million of refugees of those Central American wars walked across hot deserts to escape, and some of them ended up in the South Minneapolis. Meanwhile, an ocean away U.S. arms manufacturers, like perhaps the Honeywell corporation that had its national headquarter in the Phillips neighborhood, reaped billions selling weapons to warring factions in East Africa while other corporation reaped subsoil and agricultural profits from the region. When the Somali government dissolved into anarchy in the early 90s Somalians poured into refugee camps in Kenya. A group was eventually settled in the Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis and soon after thousands more of their compatriots joined them. I’ve heard it said that there are more Somalis in near-South Minneapolis than in Mogadishu now, but I don’t know if that is true.

There they mixed with Native Americans from the nation’s only urban reservation, the Little Earth of United Tribes; first, second and third generation African Americans who made their way “Up North”, third, fourth, and fifth generation Netherlands and other more recent European immigrants. In the mid 1990s a combination of drought in Mexico, NAFTA and job shortages in Minnesota, created the push and pull motivations that led Mexicans from the states of Morelos, Puebla and elsewhere to immigrate to Minnesota. They joined a new wave of Hmong and other Southeast Asian immigrants who came to Minnesota in the early 2000s. Many of these most recent immigrants were attracted to the increasingly global barrio of Phillips. In 2005 the Midtown Global Market, with shops owners reflecting the diversity of the neighborhood, opened in the Old Sears Tower, now the Midtown Exchange.

The Midtown Exchange is by no means some kind of small business utopia. All kinds of corporate compromises were made to fund the project, and neighborhood input was squelched several times in the process. Its survival is dependent on corporate tax dollars from Allina and Wells Fargo, whose offices in the building provide a financial anchor. The condos that fill part of the huge complex--- built right on the Greenway-- a bike, walk and soon-to-be-trolley path that connects the chain of Lakes with the Mississippi—would a great green addition to our city were it not for the sticker price per unit . At $1400 for a one bedroom, they are far from affordable for those who currently reside in the neighborhood.

Still when coats and purses are piled high without concern for security, and strangers from all over the world join each other in this urban core to dance at high noon on an arctic Sunday in January, one can be forgiven for feeling a little bit of euphoria. In the frozen tundra, the globe strikes back….. with a dance!

TRANSNATIONAL LABOR, THEN AND NOW: Century Old IWW

Century-old Industrial Workers of the World Still Offer Prescription for World Peace

The IWW is one hundred years old this spring but its political goals are just what we need today to promote peace and justice in the world. Farmworker organizer and musician Baldemar Velasquez continues the legacy of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). In 1905 the IWW founders saw themselves as an alternative to the American Federation of Labor (AFL). While the AFL generally confined itself to organizing white, male, skilled non migrant urban workers, the IWW members, or “Wobblies,” as they were dubbed, opened up their unions to women, African Americans, Mexicans, and people working temporary and “unskilled” jobs like ditch diggers and crop harvesters. While the American Federation of Labor was busy lobbying for immigration restrictions, the IWW conducted meetings in several languages, printed their publications in Spanish and English, and focused on recruiting new arrivals to the United States. The AFL organized along the lines of particular trades which made it easy for the bosses to pit one group of workers against another in a particular industry. In contrast, the IWW’s goal was to organize whole industries. The AFL put the national interests of U.S. workers above all others, but IWW promoted ONE BIG UNION, a labor federation that crossed all national borders. One century later workers face multinational corporations who use organizations like the IMF and the WTO to protect their global interests. Companies like Halliburton wave the red white, and blue to recruit soldiers to fight their battles for them, while pledging allegiance to the flag of cheap labor. One hundred years after the founding of the IWW, we need that ONE BIG UNION more than ever. Imagine if there was no place for oil companies, sneaker manufacturers, and agribusiness to go for cheaper labor; if every apple harvester from Chile to Minnesota belonged to the same labor federation; if every worker in the global soccer-ball industry carried the same union card; if every worker made a living wage, with safe and dignified working conditions; if no community was toxic-waste dumping grounds. Who would need barbed wire borders? What reason would there be to go to war? Is this a utopian pipe dream? No. In the last ten years AFL-CIO locals have been taking the first steps toward realizing this vision. They are organizing immigrant workers, with or without documents, and working with unions in other countries to build cross-border solidarity to stop runaway shops. One of the leaders of both of these progressive labor trends is Baldemar Velasquez, the president and founder of the Midwest Farm Labor Organization Committee AFL-CIO, based in Ohio. Velasquez has been working within the AFL-CIO to organize those sectors of the worker forces left to the marginalized Industrial Workers of the World 100 years ago. In addition, he is a leader of international efforts to promote labor solidarity across borders. Velasquez thinks and works locally and globally. Like the legendary IWW singer and songwriter Joe Hill, Baldemar Velasquez is a musician as well as a labor organizer. On April 9 Velasquez came to the Twin Cities to do a concert to raise funds for Centro Campesino, an organization by and for migrant workers in Southern Minnesota.Velasquez and his Aguila Negra Band sang old labor songs, Mexican folk ballads and new music of the labor and antiglobalization movements. Velasquez sprinkled stories of current struggle between his songs. His performance feeds the brain, the heart, and the soul.

COLLEGE RANKING: U.S. New and World Report Move Over:

Alternative Ranking System for Universities Shifts Priorities to Address Real Needs

Anne Winkler-Morey, W A M M Every year the conservative news magazine U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) ranks colleges and universities. Today Minnesotans are considering a "strategic positioning plan" aimed at raising the ranking of the University of Minnesota in the USNWR contest. In accordance with this occasion, we hereby inaugurate the first annual Alternative college and university ranking contest. International results will be tallied and announced later. In the meantime Minnesotans should heed this warning: The U of M's strategic positioning plan, if implemented as is, would plunge the U of M to a dangerously low spot (think triple digits) on our scale. Our Goal: We are looking for premier resource colleges and universities bold enough to tackle the world's most pressing problems, such as inequality, non-sustainability, maldistribution, and militarism. We have implemented the following measurement criteria for colleges and universities: 1. Are they financially sound? Does the community served by the institution demand "money for schools, not for war" and work to eliminate the single most wasteful and destructive drain on our education budgets-the military? Are for-profit motivated corporations funding research or does the community tax corporations and create their own research agenda? 2. Are they cooperatively managed? Do architects work with agronomists, urban planners, and educators to build cities that eliminate homelessness and hunger and provide access to mass transit and education in a manner that is sustainable for seven generations to come? Do medical researchers work hand in hand with places and people most in need of medical care to provide preventions and cures accessible to all who are afflicted? Do dancers, painters, and actors work hand in hand with educators and politicians committed to opening the doors of theaters, museums, and art curricula to reach every urban and rural community with art that genuinely reflects their realities? 3. Do they harness available brain power? Does the education institution have mechanisms in place to fully harness the knowledge of those who are experts in the problems that most acutely affect our society? For example, those who grew up without homes and people whose culture is not dominant and privileged? And people whose skin color makes them 27 times more likely to understand the inequalities of our judicial system, whose work and citizenship status makes them most acutely aware of the need for a global view of the world's problems? What about people who think differently than their teachers? What about communities where the current education system does not reach? Will people be included who best understand the need for education reform that truly leaves no child behind? 4. Do they appear to be equitable priorities? At the U of M, for example, we want to see the Rafael Espinosa School of Labor and not the Carlson School of Management have the most prestigious building on campus. We would also like to see that the building that houses the department of Chicano and American Indian Studies is fully handicappedaccessible and furnished with the best heating and cooling system, the cleanest water and the latest education technology available to students elsewhere on campus. While our final tallies will take months, today we issue the University of Minnesota this warning: The strategic positioning plan, as it is written, will plunge the U of M down in our ratings. To avoid this devastating fall in status, we suggest the following: 1. Keep General College open and expand its programs and budget. Because this is one of the programs at the U of M that addresses our brain power needs, it needs to be expanded and cloned until the entire university will, like General College, represent and serve the needs of the diverse brain power resources we have in this state. 2. Replace meaningless rhetoric with a budget and a concrete plan to make pre-K-12 education a college prep system for all in Minnesota. Eliminate deceitful rhetoric about alleged diversity and support for pre-K-12 education. Pre-K-12 education in this state has suffered horrendous budget cuts in the last five years, exacerbating education gaps between white and nonwhite, rich and poor, suburban and rural/urban students. Because the university is a land grant institution and the final stage of Minnesota's public education system, the university's strategic positioning plan must include a concrete financial plan to reverse this devastating trend. Implementing our new alternative ranking system could mean a world of change. The University of Minnesota could be not number three, not number two, but number one! May 2005: Anne Winkler-Morey is finally leaving the University of Minnesota for parts unknown, after ten years of teaching in the Chicano Studies Department.

LATIN AMERICA LEFT: Bolivians Take to the Streets Summer 2005

Bolivians Take to the Streets to Demand Fair Trade and Justice

As I write, barricades in the streets of the major cities of Bolivia, from the capital of La Paz, on the Peruvian border, to Cochabamba, in the highlands, have shut the nation down. A sea of humanity is using its bodies to stop all traffic, shut down oil wells, and prevent the government from conducting business. In doing so the protesters have toppled the presidency of Carlos Mesa and forced the resignation of the next two people in line. The people are demanding that the president of the Supreme Court assume Mesa’s position and make plans for new elections in a matter of months. So far their demands have been fulfilled. I cannot predict how events will unfold by the time you read this, but hope that this analysis will help you understand what has happened between my writing and your reading. Bolivia has the largest reserves of oil and natural gas in Latin America after Venezuela. Despite its immense natural subsoil wealth (for decades Bolivia was the world’s supplier of tin), Bolivia has not reaped the wealth of its resources. Currently foreign corporations buy the crude oil and gas, process, and sell it for seven times the price they pay Bolivia. Bolivians pay $49 a barrel for gasoline they sold to multinationals for $7. Grassroots pressure to nationalize the nation’s oil and natural gas resources have been mounting for the last five years. In early May, the Bolivian Congress passed a compromise law taxing corporations at the rate of 50 percent. President Carlos Mesa did not veto the congressional bill. Oil corporations, the U.S., and a tiny group of private elites clustered in the Eastern city of Santa Cruz and whined about the tax. Bolivian people meanwhile immediately began to mobilize protests. Led by the national labor union who were followed quickly by campesino and indigenous groups, they demanded a full nationalization of oil and natural gas resources. These demands and the militant protests of May and June 2005 should come as no surprise if we consider the following recent events: * During the election of 2002, Evo Morales with his Move toward Socialism Party (MAS) came in just 1.5 percentage points behind the winner, Sanchez de Lozada, on a platform demanding nationalization of natural gas. * In October 2003, a massive uprising removed President Sanchez de Lozada from office after he began a deal to sell natural gas to the U.S. for a pittance. Carlos Mesa became the interim president. * In a referendum in 2003 92 percent of voters said yes to nationalization. The uprising in Bolivia is also about indigenous rights. The indigenous people make up two-thirds of the population. They make up over 90 percent of those who are malnourished in Bolivia (about 70 percent of the population). In addition to nationalization of the oil and gas industries, the Aymara nation is demanding a new constitution for Bolivia. They want a Constituent Assembly that will for the first time bring indigenous people into the decision-making process in representative numbers. The Assembly would be mandated to create a new constitution for Bolivia. Unlike the Zapatistas of Mexico, the Aymara nation does not want autonomy. They want a new government for Bolivia, one based on cooperatives and local control and one that represents the culture of the majority of the population. Bolivia and the United States: Since 1990 the United States has been mired in deadly conflicts in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and East Africa while trying at the same time to impose free trade agreements and privatization campaigns on its southern neighbors. The United States has tried to use economic pressures and aid to proxy military forces (often hidden from the U.S. public or sold as an anti- drug campaign) to implement these “structural adjustments” in Latin America. The targets of privatization are not just the primary cash products like natural gas in Bolivia, but also internal necessities like health care, social security, education, water, and electricity. Bolivians engaged in a mass protest in 2000 to protect their right to water. The coalitions formed and tactics used five years ago provided an organizational starting point for the current uprising against oil and natural gas corporations. For over 105 years, the United States government has supported the interests of the petroleum industry in the region. It has threatened to cut off all aid to Bolivia if the nation’s subsoil resources are nationalized. But the U.S. public is not likely to support another war for oil. Without the Soviets to blame anymore, the United States has had to scramble to find justifications that will convince the U.S. public to support its Latin America policy. Beginning in the early 1990s, the U.S. Drug War replaced the Soviet Union as the justification for U.S. campaigns against democratic forces demanding rights in Latin America. In Bolivia drug enforcers have been poisoning the land and the farmers in the countryside in a supposed effort to stem the tide of cocaine in the U.S. Cocaleros, who are primarily indigenous farmers, have lost land and livelihood. The result has been that land ownership is increasingly in the hands of large agribusiness, and cocaine distribution in the U.S. continues. Given this reality it is no surprise that Evo Morales was able to gain widespread support demanding legalization of coca production during his 2002 campaign bid for the presidency. In this latest wave of protests the United States has found a new enemy, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. At the OAS meeting in early June 2005, U.S. Ambassador Roger Noriega proclaimed that Hugo Chavez was the mastermind behind the uprising in Bolivia. No doubt the people of Bolivia are inspired by the Venezuela revolution, as are most people working for indigenous rights and against privatization and free trade in Latin America. Noriega, however, is not talking about inspiration, but money, guns, and deals. The fact that there is no evidence of this collusion is irrelevant to the U.S. ambassador. What an old story! Those of us involved in Central America solidarity in the 1980s remember well the claim that Soviets and Cubans were the bosses of Central American campesinos. The assumption was that the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador would never think of rebelling themselves if foreign agitators did not fill their heads with false promises, slush funds, and military hardware. But some things have changed since the 1980s. Latin America is not the primary focus of U.S. policy. It is clear that there are limits to the imperial reach of the United States. Conflicts in the Eastern Hemisphere have limited U.S. resources and have allowed Latin American social movements like those in Bolivia to gain ground. I don’t know what will happen in Bolivia, but I can say the following: First, the uprising of May and June 2005 was grassroots and indigenous (in more ways then one); and second, it will not go away; and finally, the United States will try to suppress it. Depictions of Bolivian freedom fighters as terrorists, coming soon to a TV near you!

KATRINA, CORPORATIZATION: Water, Water Everywhere........

“

The time was early September 2005. I was in South Mpls and my toilet was not working. I began saving used water to flush it. As I contemplated my water issues, I thought about what was happening in places I have been and places in the news, where water was a primary issue. 4000 miles away in Nicaragua, over 90% of the people had no hot running water. In fact, forty percent of Nicaraguans spent the day without potable water. Meanwhile the United States continued building a monstrous new embassy in Managua atop a hill overlooking the city. This new embassy will cost more than it would to provide potable water for the entire country. The new embassy represents future plans for increased U.S. political and economic intervention, but not to address such basic human needs as drinking water. The U.S. is instead getting ready to enforce the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) to reluctant Nicaraguans. CAFTA makes local environmental and labor regulations illegal. Nicaraguans can expect more toxic waste polluting their local water supply. Far from the capital, thousands of rural Nicaraguans, unable to grow crops on parched soil, and unable to find a market for their produce due to the flood of cheap foreign goods made possible by neo-liberal trade policies that CAFTA will codify, spent the day collecting timber to sell in the city where even middle class people use wood to cook their gallo pinto. This led to further deforestation, which led to more desertification, and soil erosion, which meant less water for crops and animals and people. • • • One hundred and fifty miles north, is a City built around the great waterway that connects East with West. Like all other port cities Duluth thrives on its ability to attract visitors, be they ships on the way to market or tourists hungry for Lake Superior’s mysterious beauty. Today it is full of refugees from closed mines and bankrupt family farms, victims of the same neo-liberal economic policies oppressing rural and urban workers in Central America. They are joined by hundreds of urban unemployed, under-employed and underpaid full time workers who moved from public space to public space, perhaps sharing a controlled substance and their sad stories, while tourists flocked to the water front of Lake Superior enchanted by seagulls, chocolates, and ocean liners. The poverty of Duluth’s inner city was not immediately obvious to vacationers to the Northland in early September, focused on swimming, fishing and drinking water in from plastic bottles. Yet you only needed to take a public bus from the Downtown to the West Side to see the erosion of hope. In this homogenous city the poor were predominantly white. The growing class divisions in Duluth and the universal destructiveness of poverty in the United States were obvious to those willing to look. • • • 2500 miles south at the other end of Mississippi, tens of thousands of people in New Orleans stood up to their necks in toxic water, throats burning with thirst. The vast majority were African American. The people without cars who could not flee Hurricane Katrina were almost all black. They were victims of a government that, before, during and after the storm, did not provide the most basic services. No public transportation, no jobs, no tax dollars for infrastructure, just military recruiters to convince parents that the best option for their youth is to join the Marines or Guard. So Louisiana National Guard were sent across the ocean to destroy bridges and water treatment plants in Iraq instead of fixing levees at home. After the storm, the convergence of race and class in this corner of the United States, where an African American population lives in “Third World” conditions, was laid bare for all the world to see. Seven thousand miles to the east, one thousand people in Iraq, struggling to escape what they thought was a suicide bomber, fell into the historic waters of the Tigris River and drowned. Out of this converging flood of human crises and inhuman conditions in early September, 2005, I struggled to find a way to hope I took heart in the lessons that Katrina was teaching. As funds and troops overseas were not available to aid victims of Katrina, it had never been more obvious to the U.S. public, especially those victimized by the storm, that we need money for human needs not war.” (One MPR journalist interviewing victims of Hurricane Katrina reported with a tone of incredulity. “they are talking about the war in Iraq!”) When George Bush’s asserted that ‘no- one expected the levees to break’; when Laura Bush’s commented that relief services at the Astrodome were a acceptable for poor people, who have never had anything to begin with; when FEMA representatives claimed they had delivered adequate provisions to thousands of people in the New Orleans convention center, who were in reality suffering from three days without food or water; It was clear to millions of people that “when this government lies people die”. And for the first time in my life I heard millions of people asking a more fundamental question - what is this government good for? Why did they allow so many people to die from Katrina? In Cuba when they had a category five hurricane last year, only a handful of people died! With extremely limited resources, the Cuban government took responsibility for every life, making sure everyone was evacuated. They took all available measures to secure homes and provide security for people’s possessions. Their medical doctors were trained to assist Hurricane victims, and with socialized medicine everyone was accounted for. (Cuba offered to share its medical expertise with U.S. victims of Katrina, by sending 1,586 doctors equipped with hurricane relief material to the Louisiana. Although doctors on the ground begged the United States to accept this aid, the government refused.) In contrast, the United States, the richest country in the world, was unwilling to put the needs of its poorest and most vulnerable citizens first. The disabled, people in nursing homes, babies, people who live without cars or access to mass transit, these were the groups who suffered the highest causalities in the Gulf region. People began to ask: who needs a government like that? In Nicaragua and Duluth, as in much of the world, there was no dramatic event on the par with the Louisiana Sunami, just ongoing economic crises, the kinds that simmer until something brings them to a full boil. In September 2005 we lived in one world, with one water supply, one oil supply, one global economic system that favors corporate profits over human needs. The struggles for peace and justice were on many fronts, each with its own level of intensity, but it was becoming more and more obvious that they all required the same first step. Anne Winkler Morey traveled to Nicaragua and Duluth and Cuba this year. She is back in Minneapolis, listening to her radio, dreaming of revolution . . . and a good plumber.

BICYCLE TOURING: Biking Across the Great Divide

I am a city kid. As a matter of fact, far back as I know about, my ancestors have been urban people. Perhaps because of laws prohibiting Jews from owning land in Eastern Europe where my wandering ancestors harken from, the stories passed down are not filled with pigs and chickens. As for me, though I have lived in diverse urban neighborhoods—some wealthy, some impoverished, some insulated University towns and some huge international cities—I have always been close to the inner-city action. This summer I spent five weeks bicycling from Minneapolis to Estes Park, Colorado, with my partner, daughter and niece. For 33 days we moved from one rural community to another, seeking shelter, food, shade and water—and a place to rest during the heat of the day. By the end of the first day when we bedded down in Chaska, Minnesota, we had entered red—as in “red state” or Bush territory—and never left it. Much of the time I was struck by the width and depth of the rural/urban divide. We traveled through five states, several geographic strata and across one time zone, but the most graphic barometer of a community was not its location but its size. I learned to differentiate between places that I’d previously considered as all rural. Heck, I’m the one who thought I was working in a rural area when I commuted from Minneapolis to St. Cloud, to teach history at the University there, many moons ago. That’s how ignorant I was. Now I know the difference between “rural” communities with populations of 25,000; 10,000; 5,000; 1,000 and those under 500, and to my surprise, I prefer the latter. In these tiny communities (we stopped in every one we came across) there were no McDonald’s, no Dairy Queens and certainly no Wal-Marts. In fact there were usually no choices. If you sought water, food and shelter from the sun and heat, you went to the only café, gas station or bar in town. If there were two or more places, we soon learned how to find the place where the entire town was gathered. It was Sue’s Diner in Peterson, Iowa, Porky’s Bar in Winside, Nebraska, and the Sands Café in Merriman, Nebraska— where pictures of every visitor adorn the walls (we’re in the bike corner). The wayside bar and café in Hawk Springs, Wyoming—where this shellfish-eating vegetarian made the mistake of ordering Rocky Mountain Oysters—has, at any given time, three times as many diners than town residents. Then there’s the local gas station in a Nebraska town 20 miles outside of Sioux City, Iowa, whose name I can’t remember for the life of me, but whose people I will never forget. Some 30 people gathered at the gas station to kibbitz on Sunday morning, making us honorary members of their community, despite our ridiculous-looking neon bike clothing and our urban origins, and their conservative politics. Conservative, yes, as was evident from the emblems on their cars and houses. They wanted the world to know they supported the war in Iraq, and knew many loved ones fighting in it. Snippets of rabid local radio told me not to start a conversation about immigration or gay marriage with these people I depended on to fill my water bottles. I will never know how much my “white” skin, deep brown from over-exposure to the sun, and my obviously heterosexual relationship (“this is my husband, my daughter, my niece ...”) eased my interactions with my new rural friends. And yet ... Did you know that Nebraska is the first and only state in the nation to have a state-owned electric company? “If that sounds like communism,” a local book on the subject opined, “it is not an indication of the political persuasion of the people of Nebraska, who are in general very conservative.” So how did this happen? Well sometime in the ’30s the people of rural Nebraska realized they would never get electricity if they did not socialize it because there was no profit in providing this utility to such tiny and disparate communities. I can attest that this socialist mentality continues to exist when it come to basic services in Nebraska. Over and over again, people we met encouraged us to keep our eye out for windmills on every ranch, “Each has a water spigot, the water is good to drink and it’ll cool you off.” We were advised not to be deterred by barbed wire fences—“Those are for cows, not people” or property rights, “People aren’t like that here.” Two things struck me: the generosity to strangers, and the comfort in inviting us to trespass on their neighbor’s land as if it was their own. We never had to figure out how to get water from a windmill because enough people offered us water from their kitchens and garden hoses. We did, however, borrow shade from a rancher’s only tree or a farmer’s barn. Down we plopped right on someone’s front lawn— can you imagine that in the city? The only question we got was “Are you OK? Is there anything I can do for you?” I wish I had entered into some conversations with the people about the war. I did learn that in communities like Wayne (which is big enough to have a community college, but small enough to have only one movie theater) a whole national guard platoon had left this dying Nebraska Sandhills community to destroy another sand-hill community in Iraq. Every home and business declared its support for these local youth. Other economic options are few in Wayne. If you go to the community college, there is no guarantee you will get a job in your chosen field. There are simply too few people in the region to support much economic activity of any kind. The drought of several years has wilted the agricultural possibilities in a region where cows outnumber people. We had only one intimate conversation about the war during the trip, with a young man we met in an ambulance when my daughter slit her leg open (another story). This man once lived in South Minneapolis—just off Lake Street—and loved it, but had to move because he could not afford it. He moved to a tiny town in South Dakota. We met him in a town of 5,000 in Iowa, where he was training as an Emergency Medical Technician before going to Iraq. When we were about to leave the hospital he gave us his address and told us to write when we made it to Colorado. He said he would write us when he started basic training next month. When it turned out we were staying in the same hotel, we spent the evening trying to convince him there were options for him other than the military—but with no financial resources, he could not see them. We never found out what all the flags, “God bless America” signs and yellow ribbons meant, in terms of depth of support for the war or the Bush administration, but I wished I’d had a “Vets for Peace” button that suggested supporting the troops by bringing them home. I wondered how a gold-star-mother-for-peace would be treated in these communities. I don’t know. All I can tell you is that people who sported such emblems believe in social cooperation—they share with their neighbors, are intelligent, creative and kind to strangers. They live in places where there are no bookstores within a 300-mile radius, and their libraries, wonderful and inviting as they are, are decorated with posters claming that God loves America. They get only one radio station, and although I imagine they have access to every TV station and internet website, I never saw any other channel but FOX when I turned on TV. While traveling across country this news-aholic experienced the longest dry spell in her adult lifetime. I have to tell you that out there on the prairie, snippets about Israel and Lebanon, Fidel Castro’s illness and Mexico’s post-election upheaval seemed like absurd science fiction from another planet. Concerned as I was about meeting drunk drivers on the road, the only thing I knew for sure was that I hoped Mel Gibson was nowhere in the vicinity. Perhaps that is the way news from the “rest of the world” appears all the time to the hardworking rural people in these depopulated regions whose lives are filled with concerns about drought and calves and corn. I don’t know. Despite the dearth of people in these intensely rural farming and ranching communities, these European-American rural folk share with Latinos, African Americans and American Indians the tradition of providing more than their share of human cannon fodder for this country’s military adventures, generation after generation. Veterans from these parts, who return to their communities, often become recluses, sheltered from other humans by the vast empty spaces of Wyoming and Nebraska. I can only imagine the difficulty returning veterans face as they try to talk to people in these tiny communities. In the library in Basset, Nebraska, a patriotic local community group decided to interview all the veterans in their county. They found that while World War II vets might tell a battle story or two, Vietnam veterans and those from either of the Gulf wars were decidedly silent. The only comments about these more recent veterans came from relatives. One of the more extensive reports about a Vietnam vet who died at home in an “accident” was submitted by a sibling who wrote, “Like most veterans from Vietnam, he refused to talk about his service.” I wish I had some real words of wisdom, some way of crossing the chasm between rural and urban. All I have to report is this: The people out there in the so-called “red” regions are as tender and vulnerable as those in the inner city. And this war is leaving a gaping wound in their communities, as the howling prairie winds muffle the cries of veterans. The myriad yellow ribbons and the red, white and blue buntings may paper over the crimes of the government against the people for now, but for how long? When they, in the rural areas, and we, in the urban areas, have had enough, who will we turn against? Each other, or the corporations and politicians who seek to divide us and conquer us? ||

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