It’s the Same Issue: Reproductive Health & Choices

I live in Chicago, & for the past several months we’ve been getting an influx of refugees from Venezuela. The reason so many have been coming is that because we didn’t like their president (several presidents back) for his economic policies, our congress put economic sanctions on the country, and we destroyed their economy. The people coming from Venezuela are, for the most part, white, urban dwellers—and apparently either devoutly religious or culturally fatalistic. Why they don’t go to Columbia or any other Spanish speaking country is a mystery. They had to walk through several countries to get to the USA. Apparently Panama, Costa Rica, and even Mexico (I’m not suggesting either Honduras or Guatemala—also messed up royally by US foreign policy) wouldn’t do for any of these people. They have actually told volunteers they had no idea where they’d end up or what would happen, but apparently they are disappointed by the facilities they are being offered as ‘not adequate’. While I feel sorry for them (they are being bused up by DeSantis from Florida & Abbot from Texas)—& frankly—they’re right, the facilites are inadequate. We weren’t expecting them, and can’t take care of our own poor people——-the federal government has plenty of money for the military—bur dealing with the right now problem of unhoused, displaced people isn’t getting anyone’s attention…), an awful lot of these refugees are teenagers or in their early 20’s, already with at least 1 child—& pregnant to people they are not married to. They are complaining about not getting diapers for the babies….but how did they get them on their long trek?

I know: who am I to judge? I came from a culture that you don’t bear children until you can support them. It was considered a shame, an abomination. But these people have come from a culture who apparently believe using contraception is not God’s way, and the rest of us should take care of the children they bear and can’t care for.

How dare I? Bearing children is a right, right?

Well, on the opposite end of personal choice are that all male members of the South Carolina Supreme Court, which has decided to ban all abortions because the unborn (that would be people who don’t exist) have rights. & look at Alabama, where the old white guys—-not religion or philosophy majors, have decided eggs are children. They are without sin, so are more important than the rest of us who are actually breathing. The logic evades me. They’ve decided, due to philosophical or religious leanings, that if you get pregnant , if contraception failed, or you were raped , the unborn is more important and has more rights than the woman forced to carry that fetus. Decided by men who would never be in your position.

What a great country this is where a few men can decide what the rest of us should believe. This is, of course, a pretzel logic philosophy. It requires those of us who don’t believe you are born until you breath to abide by a law set by people who believe that God only takes you to Heaven if you are saved by his son, Jesus, and that all that stuff we learned in the old Testament is negated, but more, that they should decide what we should believe and adhere to.

When people bear children they can’t support, morally, the rest of us must—as they are real breathing people. But that (in theory) takes resources away from those who were born and planned, but are special needs and handicapped. How unselfish is that? I’d like to have music and art classes in our public schools, but we have to take care of the special needs kids who will always be a burden to society no matter if they are in school or not.

Meanwhile, I guess the logic is that you have rights until others who are more philosophical decide you don’t.

Why is the Term ‘Minor’ a Legal Designation?

If you study anthropology, you learn that some actions people take are cultural and learned from other people in their culture. In some cultures, toddlers are allowed to pick up sharp knives and walk around with them. In some cultures, men believe their penises are disappearing into their bodies, and request wives to perform fellatio to prevent this. In some cultures children always sleep with their parents until they become teenagers. In Maasai (African) society, teenagers are circumcized and sent out to kill lions.

In America, since WWII, we’ve had a culture of teenage girls becoming anorexic, and more recently, for teenage boys not being able to handle a physical hormone surge with the accompanying anger, are compelled to kill others…with guns legally bought.

Did you, as a kid, ever do anything illegal that was also considered dangerous? We used to play in houses being constructed. We could have easily fallen through holes in the floor. I never shoplifted, but I had friends who did, got caught, and their parents were hauled into a hearing to let them know they had to pay. How about friends playing ball who broke windows. Parents were responsible for what their kids did.

Yes, of course the kisa are mentally ill. but when your outward behavior appears normal, and is dismissed as ‘boys will be boys’, it’s impossible to stop, especially since it’s so easy to get a gun. How ironic that you have to be 18 to buy cigarettes—and 21 in most states to buy alcohol….& your parents are considered irresponsible if they allow you to partake in alcohol and tobacco. But guns?

So I don’t understand the series of unfortunate events where Jennifer and James Crumbley were not automatically responsible for giving their teenage son Ethan a gun and refusing to believe , even when presented with evidence that he had obsessive thoughts of violence, that he was having emotional issues, & that there was at least a 50/50 chance he would use guns to kill.

I don’t understand why, when the school principal called the parents in to tell them they needed to take him home, that he was in crisis (and they didn’t), that the school didn’t call child protection, or whatever the agency would be.

And this went to trial. Oh, I guess it was deciding whether they were accessories to murders or to be charged with involuntary manslaughter. Oh, the nuances.

Book Review: the Balfour Declaration, by Jonathan Schneer

In this review, I want to say where I am coming from: I am a secular Jew, not a Zionist. These days, a Zionist is one who believes that Jews should be totally in charge of Israel, too bad about the native Palestinians, and those who support the Likud government attempt to bomb Hamas to oblivion. Never mind that that can’t be done. I am horrified that Likud has gotten support from the United States—the thinking being that if the USA doesn’t support the Israeli government, Iran will bomb Israel to oblivion.

When other Jews ask us to support Israel….are we being asked to support Israeli government policy, or the people?

The idea that Israel exists at all is interesting. Based on the words of 56 MEN (over voting the 51 who did NOT want to support Jews whose plan was to eliminate native peoples, but work with them to support a multi-religious state…) the British conveniently FORGOT their promise to Hussein for assistance in building that multi-religions country controlled by the people there . More horribly, Hussein trusted the British to keep their word to him. This is history. Hussein would have had his followers support the ‘Young Turks’ who hoped to overthrow the Ottoman empire for the the control of the people. The allies would not have ‘won’ World War I: A counterfactual condition which has led to tragedy.

Years ago, I was traveling in Malaysia with a Malaysian man. I asked him what he thought about the country being overrun by Chinese. What he told me was interesting. To paraphrase, he said that most Malay didn’t care as long at the Chinese didn’t attempt to influence government policy. The system worked. Of course, most people were either Buddhist or Moslem—neither of which religion proselytizes.

I don’t think that many American know that there weren’t many Jews involved in lobbying the British during WWI for a ‘colony’ (protectorate) in Palestine. More—by a vote of 51 to 56, the ‘assimilationists’ (those British Jews who were quite happy to be Jewish in Europe, particularly Britain), who were concerned also about the Arabs already living in Palestine…lost to the Zionists who planned to push the Arabs out. & here we are.

Jewish friends have pushed me into a corner, asking, “Are you saying Israel doesn’t have a right to exist?”

A poorly kept secret has come to light: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

If it’s either/or? No. Now, get rid of Likud, get the settlers off disputed land, admit that in many cases, if not most, the original settlers—the Palestinians (many of whom are Christians) were terrorized off their land and deserve reparations, stop harassing the Palestinians now in Israel, and ask both Britain and France to admit their role in lying to the Arabs, and we may be on our way to peace.

Book Reviews: A History of Burning, by Janika Oza

When I saw a mini review of this book in The New Yorker, I knew I had to read it. So little is written of the Asian experience in Africa. My own book, The Pleasure Seeker, is about a more recent history, but involves a family story started when parents were trafficked to Africa from India.

In the US (and I would assume most of the rest of the world, but particularly Europe), we learn so little about the rest of the world—particularly areas colonized by the Europeans. It’s as though nothing of importance happened before Europeans ‘civilized’ Africa and Asia. What we learn is that the Europeans divided Africa in 1885 at the Berlin Conference. As though nobody lived there. However, trouble started when the slave trade started.

This book begins with a patriarch, as a teenager, being tricked onto a boat, being told he’d make money. His family is desperately poor, he has no idea where he’s going, thinking not possibly far, and he is enslaved, working on the railroad the British were installing over Kenya into Uganda.

The story is told in little vignettes: as the father marries and has children, and their children marry and have children. The timeline is a bit off, but basically accurate about what occurred. When the British left, they’d show these Africans that they couldn’t govern themselves. They left Milton Obote in charge, He was then overthrown by idi Amin, whom the British supported (the Europeans and the United States have a terrible history of supporting corrupt, cruel rulers in the name of economic development/freedom for exploitation).

Most of the family ultimately settles in Canada (except for the oldest daughter) and starts anew, keeping a sad secret from the youngest child. They, again, encounter racism, but have a community of other refugees, and push along. There is talk of returning to Uganda, as Museveni had saida mistake was made and invited the Asians back. Turns out, Museveni is also a dictator, but that’s an aside.

The ending is somewhat sad, although not unrealistic. I wish a glossary had been included. I knew most of the food terms, and I had known the history because 1 of my first Swahili teachers (in the 1980s) was a Ugandan refugee. 

I hope high school teachers will add this to their curriculum of books addressing the experience of Africans.

Why do we allow lobbyists to make our foreign policy?

Ah, the GOP continues to murmur about what they a call ‘entitlements’. Somehow, grants to the wealthy aren’t entitlements, foreign aid isn’t an entitlement. over-funding the military isn’t entitlement… but what we pay into— Social Security and Medicare—are entitlements? Why aren’t the media—the journalists we do the reporting—-addressing this jargon as a false narrative?

Meanwhile, since the 1960s, we’ve been sending foreign aid to dictators. The rationale is that democracy will come when they have strong economies. We’re ‘encouraging’ ‘right thinking & policy’. However, we know from history, and analyzing the facts, that democracy doesn’t appear until most of the population is literate, has access to communication infrastructure as well as basic health care, until women can control their fertility, until all children have access to education… and there is no unfair support by outside powers to keep a status quo that obviously isn’t working.

I keep returning to social indicators. The push for self rule in Africa happened when there were enough literate Africans as well as communication to address colonial powers. Same with Viet Nam. Why didn’t it happen in India? Social stratification through ‘genetic’ caste being supported by political recognition. Which we, in the USA, apparently think is fine.

We say that we support democracy…but look at our history? We’re always on the wrong side.

Now, again, we are addressing what h is happening in Israel and Palestine. England played both sides and will not address what they caused: taking land that belong to people—Arabs— promising assistance with self-rule—and giving the exact same parcel to a small group (less than 200?) Zionist men. Let the chips fall where they may, eh?

Why did they do that? Because the Zionists were white Europeans & nobody liked the Jews. The Jews wanted a land that the Bible says is theirs. It could have happened peacefully, but that’s not what England cared about.

Because the holy land is holy also to Christians, American foreign policy—also shaped by white men—developed a convoluted narrative, which even fostered more antisemitism.

It doesn’t matter that antisemitism and hate crimes are illegal. This is white American culture. Our foreign policy is more influenced and e developed by public relations agencies for dictators than Americans who have to pick our battled. My tax dollars at work.

Book Review:Can The Situation in the Middle East be Fixed?

I am a secular Jew. I was raised as a Reform Jew. That means we don’t do the daily or weekly rituals. How do Reform Jews raise their children? We’re taught the gist of the Old Testament (“The Bible”) stories, and many of us celebrate the ‘High’ holidays (Rosh Hashana/Yom Kippur…& later, Pesach), but the gist is that there is one God. Jesus may have existed, but he’s not ‘special’. We don’t believe in virgin birth… we’re all God’s children.

We’re told the one God we believe in is the same God the Christians and Muslims believe in, but we believe God is inside us–our conscience. We are the chosen people, but Sikh people also believe God is inside us. More, Sikh believe women and men are equal (Jews believe women are separate but equal). We also believe in altruism like the Sikh do. Altruism is important for our communities—not for future reward in the afterlife.

It wasn’t until I was an adult, and read the Bible (several different translations into English) that I learned that Jews kept slaves—but we were to release them in the jubilee year. I also read so many contradictions.

We were Zionists by default. My parents married in the early 1950s, and it was important to them to live near other Jews. Skokie, a suburb of Chicago, was open to Jews. They could get mortgages and home owners insurance. So, I lived in a tolerant, secular appearing community.

My parents joined a synagogue, and we bought trees for Israel.

It wasn’t until I was a teenager, and got a goyem boyfriend (and also went to visit an acquaintance in rural Illinois) that I understood that we Jews were different….from Christians. I just didn’t know how, or why. Was it only because we didn’t believe only Jesus was the child of God? You may notice, in the New Testament—-it’s disciples expounding—not God.

The goyem— Christians, tell us they believe that Jesus was Jewish, and we Jews killed Jesus by betraying him. I still don’t understand the logic, but in the era of Trump, it’s a little more clear.

What we believe, in terms of philosophy, doesn’t really matter as much as how we manifest out beliefs. Jews support Israel because we have no other place to go (we believe) if goyem come after us. Actually, we could go to Buddhist countries, but a small group of Zionists—many of whom were atheist (which also angers goyem) convinced the anti-semites in Europe that they should help us take over Palestine politically, with violence, if necessary.

We have Israel due to anti-semitism. It seems we believed the myth that Palestine was sparsely populated, and the land belonged only to Jews.That’s what our parents taught us: The whole of Palestine was a desert, barren, and the Jews made it bloom.

The reality was different, of course. I recently started reading Jonathan Schneer’s “The Balfour Declaration” https://www.amazon.com/Balfour-Declaration-Origins-Arab-Israeli-Conflict/dp/0812976037 (2010 Random House), which adds detail to both T.E. Lawrence’s and Scott Anderson’s (Lawrence in Arabia) accounts of how this mess came to be.

The British have a lot to answer for, but the gist is that they did not respect the Arabs who controlled the land, and made promises they had no intention of keeping. Yet, they are off the hook, choosing to put their money into the monarchy. In the 21st century. totally silent about the hatred they fomented.

As many have pointed out, Gaza could have been developed like Singapore or Hong Kong, but the hatred the Palestinians had for the usurpers (Jews) combined with their cultural reality has made it so I don’t think the dynamics can be fixed. Their anger should be aimed at the British, but how would they know why this happened? They didn’t have radios, they couldn’t read English newspapers even if they were available. Suddenly, they were invaded—first, just by settlers, then by the British military. The movie, “Exodus” (based on the book by Leon Uris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exodus_(Uris_novel) makes the founding of Israel seen so romantic. In fact, it was brutal and messy.

Would the British fund reparations to the families that lost their land? Shouldn’t they?

As far as giving Israel back—not gonna happen. i believe the disputed territories should be returned, but I don’t live in Israel. More, I live on Native American land. We have a lot to answer for, but let me state right now that prayer to God—or Jesus, is a waste of time

Israel & Palestine: You Have to Understand History—& Unintended Consequences

Horrible. I can’t imagine what outcome Hamas planned…unless they believe martyrs are saved by God & will end up in heaven. Could there be any other explanation? That they planned to die & take a bunch of innocent people with them?

I am Jewish. I was raised a Jew, and although my global outlook is more Sikh (because it makes a ton more sense), my relatives were victims of antisemitism.I know nothing about Jesus, heaven, or hell, except for what believers have told me.

Why are so many antisemitic? The only thing I can figure out is that Christians resent the fact that we’re happy believing we’re not sinners and not being saved, that we can’t petition God or use prayer to change what’s pre-ordained. That—& they earn ‘brownie points’ with God/Jesus for lying to us.

There are lots of lies in the Bible. My favorite shocking 1 is when God tells Moses to tell the Israelites to ‘borrow’ wealth and jewels from their neighbors because they are going to flee to The Promised Land. Lots of bad stuff there. The Jews are kept wandering, told to sacrifice perfect animals, and make war on people God says are bad. Not that the new Testament is any better. Slavery remains permitted, even sanctioned. Go figure. It’s one reason I turned to Sikh.

I always new that Israel was a construct, and ‘we’ needed Israel because nobody else tolerated us. But how Israel got to be is a story most of the world doesn’t understand, Yes—we believe God gave us the land, but we apparently left, so how does that work as an excuse since we left?

You actually have to go back to WWI. A brilliant explanation of why America got involved in World War I is given in Howard Zinn’s “Peoples History of the United States.”

America didn’t have a horse in that race. We supported our European allies who were after Middle Eastern oil. Forget the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It had nothing to do with Americans.

You learn about all this in a context if you read about T.E, Lawrence. I won’t go into what an interesting guy he was. He joined the army as a cartographer, but was fascinated by Arab life, He was a rule breaker. Long story short, he realized the allies were losing the war to the Ottomans. The Arabs were also fed up with being rules by foreigners. Lawrence asked his superiors if he could train the Arabs and have the Allies be ‘allied’ with them…and it worked. They turned the war around.

During this time of working with the Arabs, Lawrence met with Faisal, son of Hussein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal%E2%80%93Weizmann_agreement:

At the time the agreement was made, there had preceded it (apart from the Balfour Declaration) the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Hogarth message, the Bassett Letter, the Declaration to the Seven and the Anglo-French Declaration. Of these, the Sykes-Picot Agreement had been made public by the Bolsheviks and the Declaration to the Seven as well as the Anglo-French Declaration were also public documents. The Sykes–Picot Agreement had called for an “Arab State or a Confederation of Arab States … under the suzerainty of an Arab chief”. The French and British also proposed an international administration in the “brown area” (an area including Jerusalem, similar to and smaller than Mandate Palestine), the form of which was to be decided upon after consultation with Russia, and subsequently in consultation with the other Allies, “and the representatives of the Shereef of Mecca”.^[8]

Henry McMahon had exchanged letters with Faisal’s father Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca in 1915, in which he had promised Hussein control of Arab lands with the exception of “portions of Syria” lying to the west of “the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo“. Palestine lies to the southwest of these areas and wasn’t explicitly mentioned. That modern-day Lebanese region of the Mediterranean coast was set aside as part of a future French Mandate. After the war the extent of the coastal exclusion was hotly disputed. Hussein had protested that the Arabs of Beirut would greatly oppose isolation from the Arab state or states, but did not bring up the matter of Jerusalem or Palestine. Between 1916 and 1920, the British government interpreted these commitments as including Palestine in the Arab area. However, in the 1922 Churchill White Paper they argued instead that Palestine had been excluded.^[b]

On the basis of McMahon’s assurances the Arab Revolt began on 5 June 1916. However, the British and French also secretly concluded the Sykes–Picot Agreement on 16 May 1916.^[11] This agreement divided many Arab territories into British- and French-administered areas and allowed for the internationalisation of Palestine.^[11] Hussein learned of the agreement when it was leaked by the new Russian government in December 1917, but was satisfied by two disingenuous telegrams from Sir Reginald Wingate, High Commissioner of Egypt, assuring him that the British government’s commitments to the Arabs were still valid and that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was not a formal treaty

Here’s where it gets complicated, and really, the British & French are to blame. Not only did the British not hold up their end, but a very small group of right wing Zionists decided they were not just moving in, but taking over.

If you’ve ever been to Malaysia, you know there is a very large ‘minority’ of Chinese, who have been there for over a century now. The Malay people never had a problem with the Chinese because the Chinese don’t get involved in politics. They just do business.

This was not good enough for the white European Zionists….and to this day, the very Orthodox Jews (who don’t consider me Jewish, but want me to defend them), who also don’t respect their women, always try to take more than they should. They settle on disputed land, and do everything they can to make life difficult for the indigenous people…many of whom have moved to Gaza or the West Bank because they’ve been pushed out with violence. What can they do? the world believes the PLO and Hamas are the same, that these people are backward and don’t deserve rights, and they have nothing left to lose. & the Orthodox Jews continue to ‘poke the bear’.

We Jews al;ways claim we had no place else to go. Hmmm…many went to Argentina, South Africa, Cuba, and were welcome in Thailand and Malaysia. Of course, we wouldn’t be in charge.

In America, we deny our history. I was taught that all of Israel was desert, and the land wasn’t occupied. That wasn’t the truth…but then, I was also taught that Africans had no culture or religion, and Europeans did them a favor by enslaving them & bringing them to Christianity.

Israel is known as the only democracy in the Middle East. It is as much a democracy as India. Is India a true democracy?

There’s a lot to unravel here. But just as we in America can’t rid ourselves of right-wing Christian nationalists—who now control our Supreme Court and also commit terrorist acts and always have, we can’t be blaming the entire Palestinian people for Hamas.

We Jews have to support the current government of Israel. But we also have to speak out against Likud and taking i disputed land—because there will never be enough land.

Why Do We Give Almost a Billion Dollars of AID to Uganda?

In case you, as an American, believes that our foreign policy has anything to do with human rights, I’ve got news for you. We don’t care.

The whole foreign aid thing started after WWII, and lobbyists (public relations people) got on board quickly. If the leader of a less developed country said he wasn’t a communist, we gave him money. Seriously. Our whole foreign policy has been—for years—- giving money to dictators who claim to not be communists (or at least under the sphere of the USSR).

We send negotiators who may or may not have degrees in political science, development, economics…it never really mattered if OUR PEOPLE had ever been to the countries they were suggesting we Americans should give aid to. The goals were vague: to make their governments friendly to the USA? Certainly not to improve living standards for most citizens. Even the World Bank believes that citizens should pay for education and medical care.

It’s difficult to learn about a country’s policies unless you live there. In Malawi, there were laws that women could not wear pants or trousers unless they wore a shalwars Khameez tunic over it. Skirts had to cover women’s knees. Men’s hair could not touch their collars (to prevent white hippies from settling in and changing the ‘culture’).

We’ve given a lot of aid to Malawi. You can Google by country, how much aid we give in three year aid cycles. The goals? Who even checks to see if the literacy rate has gone up? If people are food secure? If they have access to health care? In fact, due to some really screwed up politicians, many women can’t get access to family planning services because we believe the Christian Bible says we should be fruitful and multiply.

I call out Uganda because they have the most restrictive laws regarding LGBTQ people—including prosecuting those who associate with them. This makes no sense. Worse, it shows that the people who make the decisions about aid are racist, sexist, elitist—& don’t care about human rights. Then they wonder why so many people become refugees & try to come to the USA.

Book Review: “The Iraq War (Secret History)”

As I write this (summer, 2023), a segment of Americans are trying to get libraries—particularly school libraries, to ban books. Mostly, parents and pseudo-religious ‘Christians’ want books about sexual activity, sexual ‘orientation’ (being homosexual, transsexual, bisexual),and ‘alternative lifestyles’ banned. In many parts of America, people are trying to get drag shows (where men dress as women and perform, singing, mostly) banned and even making cross dressing illegal. Seriously, look at how Catholic priests dress, and statistically, how often children are abused by them—but there is no movement to ban the Catholic Church. Baffling.

Now this book, written for a middle school audience and published in 2010 by Arcturus Publishing, LTD, is not about sex at all. It’s about real history: the Iraq War that George H.W, Bush started with a ‘preemptive strike; (meaning, the USA started the war) claiming Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass destruction’, and was harboring terrorists. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and to Americans, because of the Saudi nationals involved in the 9/11 attacks (which occurred after the Gulf War…), we believed what we wanted to believe. In fact, if you showed Americans a geopolitical map or a globe, they couldn’t find Kuwait, Iraq or Iran on it,.

I remember this war, when it all happened, and here is a book written for kids that tells the historical truth, and who the decision makers are. It’s wonderful! Very well written and designed. I hope you will order a copy for your kids’ school libraries.

If You Have Kids, I Have to Ask…..

It’s July 2023. In much of the world (not just the USA—the world), we’re experiencing not just record high air temperatures, but intense storms. Our oceans are unusually warm, and coral is dying. Ocean currents are changing. Fish schools are declining. We’ll be paying more for fish than mammal meat very soon—if there are fish to buy.

Al Gore published “An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, where he quoted meteorologists and other environmental scientists about what would happen…and it has.

About 20 or so years before that, in the early 1980s, a friend asked me to join the board of a start-up nonprofit: Uptown Recycling Station. The way she and a few other do-gooders envisioned it, we’d open a recycling station for glass, metals, and paper, and we’d buy this discarded waste from people we called ‘alley entrepreneurs”: mostly southeast Asian (Viet Namese, Laotians, Cambodians) refugees, They’d have small businesses, and we’d start getting people recycling.

It was what my father called ‘a cute hippie idea’.

Ken Dunn, the father of recycling in Chicago (and many other creative community based ideas) was already starting a curbside collection route in Rogers Park, where I later moved. On the face of it, it was a crazy idea. We had to canvas the neighborhood & convince people to source separate their newspapers, magazines, jars & cans, and collect them. We’d prove to the city that people supported the venture.

At the time, Harold Washington was mayor. Our first black mayor, and a progressive. He hired people to work for the city based on skill, not patronage. However, we still had an overabundance of patronage workers—especially in the department of ‘Streets and Sanitation.”

Say your doofus kid wasn’t going to college—especially a white kid. You—the dad—would contact the ward committeeman, and get your kid hired. In exchange, around election time, you’d work for the approved candidate.

Yes—that was the famous CHICAGO WAY.

What we recycling do-gooders had to do was arrange to collect set-outs on a day that streets & sans didn’t collect garbage. Even though our project was small, already the streets & sans employees saw us as a threat. As though there wasn’t enough garbage for us all.

It wasn’t that so much as that with us out on the street:, we saw a lot of them goofing around and not working. Even sleeping on the job. It wasn’t just us. Newspaper photographers took photos, too.

How did we prove to our elected officials that we got participants? By weighing what he collected (before reselling it—which Ken Dunn did for us). We then asked for a DIVERSION CREDIT. That is, we knew the city paid for landfill space by the cubic yard (yes—still done that way), so we wanted to be paid (by the ton—we had an idea of what the average cubic yard weighed) for the recyclables we collected. We used that money to pay recycling center staff (the southeast Asian refugees).

We got a lot of support from area philanthropic groups, because we were a pilot project, and very new. What’s amazing is that our route—in Rogers Park—was filled with apartment buildings. A very HIGH DENSITY NEIGHBORHOOD. When I got to grad school a decade later, I learned that annual turnover of rental units was about 30 %. Yet, we got participation.

We hippie do-gooders strategized and got a lot of support, but our aldermen were mostly white men who took their orders from more influential white men, or black guys beholden to white men, and it was slow going. The streets & sans garbage men would change their route days & trash our collectibles. We had a lot of meeting with their bosses.

As source separating trash for recycling gained popularity, the powers that were, under a new mayor, Hizzoner, jr (Richie Daley), cut a deal with Waste Management & the aldermen decided if we wanted to recycle, we had to buy BLUE BAGS. & we do-gooders bought blue bags! The garbage guys of Streets & Sans would collect the blue bags along with the garbage—it would all go in the same truck & be separated later. Riiiiight.

Of course the bags got torn. Waste Management had lawyers who were told by the EPA that THEY had to do better, and around 1990, some low density communities started getting BLUE BINS—-a separate cart for recyclables. The whole city got them by 2007.

Very little education was done around all these changes. In fact, the rumor was that no matter what we separated for recycling, less than 10% was actually resold as input material. We’ve been hovering at 8% for decades, as there has never been any actual commitment to recycling since the Washington administration.

Yet, I still source separate. In grad school, researching curriculum change (for environmental science), I learned that it is not necessarily up to the school board to implement curriculum or policy change: the principal of every school has a say—-& virtually none have been committed to primary school environmental education, recycling or energy conservation in their schools. They aren’t paying the bills, so why should they, right? Also, every time their is a principal or Local School Council change, it is as though everyone has to reinvent the wheel.

What got me thinking about all this was….after we got blue bins, they were put in Chicago parks, too, Now, the smart thing to do would be to someway link a black trash bin to a blue recycling bin, but why would we do something like that if the employees who pick y up the trash are paid whether they do a good job or not? The Streets & Sans guys would say that people moved (or even stole) the blue bins. Nobody cared.

I went to a community meeting the other day. We have lump sum budgeting in Chicago, where every ward is given $1.5 million to spend at the alderman’s discretion. Since we’re progressives, our last alderman allowed us to vote on how $1million would be spent. We started in 2009.

So now it’s 14 years later. Not many people showed up at the meeting, but 1 guy who did was on the park advisory council. I said something about the blue bins overflowing at a park I ride my bike through, and said something about calling the ward superintendent, and he shook his head and told me, “That won’t work. The city doesn’t pick up trash or recycling from the park. There is no recycling. the Park District said it was too hard, and they contract with a waste hauler.

So why are there blue bins in the park? Everyone claims residents move them over to the parks. Is it because the residents think recycling is stupid, or because they see there are not enough trash bins, so they bring over their unused bins because they don’t know who to call?

What makes this even more frustrating is that because of this, new people come in and either are trying to recycle & don’t realize that if they throw away aluminum or glass in the park it won’t be recycled, or they have no idea that the bins are being used for mixed trash. the bottom line is: the streets and sans employees started out with this ‘culture’ of sabotaging recycling, and the private waste hauler is continuing with this sabotage.

Is it really too difficult to address landlords about recycling—& telling them they will be fined if they don’t explain recycling to new tenants (& if they want to not get a raise in rent, to put their recyclables in the blue bins)? Is it too difficult to address the many groups that work with refugees (many of whom have never used a flush toilet, either)> Why aren’t our schools teaching environmental science and what a difference the small actions make?

So glad I don’t have children.

https://news.wttw.com/2020/05/28/ask-geoffrey-brief-history-chicago-trash