|
Viewpoint:
Doubtful Theory-- HIV, pornography and the Internet.
Viewpoint:
Resistance-- In defense of revolutionary violence.
Natural
Resistance: Pledging to the Light -- Matching
our words and our values.
Living
Out: Where the Men Aren't.
Letters:
EW readers sound off.
Doubtful Theory
HIV, pornography and the Internet.
The nearly universal presence of the Internet in the
U.S. has had a number of interesting effects. It has (among other
things):
--Given people the ability to communicate with each
other, regardless of time zone, with great convenience, and at very
low cost.
--Facilitated the unprecedented widespread availability
of pornography, with great convenience, and at very low cost.
The second point demonstrates (among other things)
the fact that the HIV Theory of AIDS is wrong. Sounds crazy? Read
on.
The pornography industry is thriving as never before,
and this demonstrates a fatal flaw in the HIV theory of AIDS, because
by now, most of the people in the porn industry ought to be dead.
Let's face it -- the porn movie set is not a
monument to safe sex. The "DNA" flies everywhere, and condom use is
virtually non-existent. Add to this, multiple partners (sometimes
literally hundreds) and anal sex, and you have a textbook-perfect
environment for the spread of HIV and AIDS. HIV tests are useless
in the porn world, as they are supposed to detect HIV antibodies,
not the virus itself, a technique too slow to be effective. The body
count should be appalling, as the disease races through the industry.
Porn film producers should be desperate for new recruits to replace
performers who have died, or who have quit the business, in fear for
their lives. Reformed porn stars, now dying, should be ubiquitously
present as spokespersons for safe sex (in the way that reformed smokers
warn of the perils of tobacco). Or at least, we should be seeing them
hawking AZT and protease inhibitors, crediting these drugs with (at
least temporarily) rescuing them from certain death.
Instead, porn video stars have been crossing over
into mainstream films and TV, while occasionally, mainstream actors
move into porn. Mainstream entertainment, including movies, TV advertising
and music videos, incorporates the aesthetics of porn in its products.
If AIDS were a problem, the glamour-addicted mainstream media would
not be cozying up to porn, as the treatments for the disease are horrendously
toxic. Most people do not know, for example, that protease inhibitors
can cause strokes and lipodystrophy, a disfiguring re-distribution
of fat in the human body, giving people pot bellies, humped backs
and hollow cheeks-- very unglamorous.
According to the February 2001 issue of Talk
magazine, the porn industry has a big problem with other STDs,
not with AIDS. If the latter really were an STD, it would statistically
track with the other STDs. It doesn't, so it isn't.
Dr. Kary Mullis won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry
in 1993 for his invention of "PCR"-- Polymerase Chain Reaction
-- a technology that enables scientists to produce short, made-to-order
DNA sequences in large quantity, and AIDS doctors to detect tiny amounts
of HIV in the human body. Mullis considers the latter activity to
be a misuse of his invention, a way to artificially exaggerate the
presence of HIV or any other microorganism. In his book, Dancing
Naked in the Mind Field, he flatly states that the HIV theory
of AIDS is pure nonsense, that the fundamental research proving that
HIV causes AIDS simply does not exist, and that the mere correlation
of HIV antibodies with AIDS is a far cry from proof of causation.
(He goes on to say that HIV co-discoverer Robert Gallo is an "asshole,"
but that's another story.)
There are other problems with the HIV theory. AIDS
in the U.S. remains mostly in the same groups in which it has always
been: highly promiscuous gay men and intravenous drug abusers. In
Africa, it is reportedly a heterosexual disease. One proposed explanation
for this discrepancy is that there are different strains of the virus
in Africa. But commercial airline travel erases the geographic barriers
and the African HIV strains should have arrived here years ago. There
are also problems with the HIV tests themselves. More than 50 different
medical conditions, including pregnancy, can produce a positive HIV
test, making the AIDS statistics in the U.S. questionable, at best.
In Africa the stats are a joke. Funding for HIV tests is not available
for the poor, and doctors label diseases like tuberculosis and malaria
as AIDS manifestations, as a way of obtaining much-needed funding
from the World Health Organization.
An essay such as this can only scratch the surface
of this subject. Interested readers can find a large database on dissenting
views on AIDS at www.virusmyth.net
Gordon Kaswell is a freelance writer on science-related
issues, and an award-winning musician. He performs regularly in Eugene.
Back to Top
Resistance
In defense of revolutionary violence.
The nonviolence panel
Spruce Houser's presentation at the Public Interest Environmental
Law Conference "nonviolence panel" was for the most part an attack
on local anarchists from the perspective of self-congratulatory moral
superiority. He was particularly outraged at the local publication
Green Anarchy and its promotion of violent direct action taken
in self defense against oppressors, its expressed lack of care for
the lives lost of capitalist and law enforcement pigs on Sept. 11th,
and the general use of violent imagery. The moralism and tone of immediacy
felt like a return to the censorship era when rap groups and punk
bands were getting trampled by moralistic Christian Coalition and
Parents Music Resource Center activists of the '80s and '90s. This
was most evident when Spruce discussed Green Anarchy's review
of the recently released revolutionary hip-hop album by The Coup,
referring to the album as "a musical CD of some type." Spruce seemed
to have the paternalistic Tipper Gore-influenced need to protect his
movement of nonviolent purity from the evil violence of this paper.
 Perhaps
if Spruce had rather than played the "shock" game with a few of the
more violent images from the paper and instead read aloud an article
discussing indigenous perspectives on resistance, perhaps a communiqué
from the many actions listed in the news section, perhaps a poem,
it would have made more sense.
What Spruce and all reactionary pacifists miss about
the promotion of "violent" direct action is that no one wants to use
violence to establish a violent society. "Violent" anarchists seek
to end violence as much as pacifists, if not more, in that they are
actually serious about it and willing to risk their lives and "freedom."
A critique of nonviolence, not as
a tactic but as a moral philosophy.
From a rigid moral ideological
approach it can never be expected that images such as those in Green
Anarchy could be understood as anything but senseless glorification
of violence. The nonviolent perspective lacks an understanding of
the context of political violence.
Industrial civilization's role in the threat to our
lives is analogous to a gun pointed at our heads. Most of us do not
see it, though it is there; some of us see it and understand we must
take necessary direct action to disarm and destroy the industrial
assailant. Most of those who perceive this imminent execution reside
in the "Third World" where this analogy is often quite literal, there
is no illusion, political struggle is a matter of life and death,
either in the form of genocide, ecocide or ethnocide. Only under conditions
of privilege in the form of material abundance, the existence of "human
rights," etc. can the gun seem not to exist; only under these conditions
can the immediacy and imminence of the threat to our lives be distanced
enough in our consciousness as to allow for the material, intellectual
and philosophical space to even ponder the situation, let alone spend
years of an academic or activist life distilling a moral truism of
nonviolence.
Nonviolence is an intellectual and philosophical abstraction
that's movements were ineffective and that's modern ideologues are
mostly white, privileged, First World thinkers. This is not to say
that the politics and practice of nonviolence are not employed when
effective throughout Third World struggles or in the impoverished
regions of the First World; rather, what is not shared historically
in the struggles of the Third World is a set of moral rules that dictate
present and future agency in response to or against the dominant power
structure.
Resistance is guided by historical processes, spontaneity,
effectiveness and the chaos of the life-force. It is not governed
by beliefs created within one cultural and historic context. The philosophical
imperialism of nonviolence as human truth is an affront to every struggle
that has through its own history, for its own reasons, toward its
own ends and comprised of its own cultures, stepped into Spruce Houser's
category of "violence"; which, if considering the analogy of the gun,
can be remembered to always be self defense.
Leon Czolgosz is a collective member of local publication
Green Anarchy. Leon promotes involvement in and awareness of
the growing global movement of ecological anarchism as tool of analysis
and praxis of resistance. To obtain a copy of Green Anarchy #8,
write to P.O. Box 11331, Eugene 97440.
Back to Top
Pledging to the
Light
Matching our words and
our values.
A Gary Larsen cartoon shows astronomer Carl Sagan as a young child.
He's looking up at the night sky, saying something like, "Wow! There must be
HUNDREDS of stars!"
Perhaps the following could be a similar picture of someone who
was destined to be a biologist: At school as a child, I remember reciting the Pledge
of Allegiance. What thrilled me was the heartbeat under my hand. There it was, every
morning, beating, just as it had been when I last checked, the morning before. It
had a quiet, pulsing rhythm. It was me, alive, inside there. Very mysterious.
I haven't stood up for or saluted any flag, or recited any pledge
of allegiance since grade school, and likely never will, but it's not because I'm
trying to make some political point or be obstinate. It's just that if I ask myself
whether I really give my allegiance to a flag or a nation (or even any person, right
or wrong), I have to admit the answer is "no."
Which leads to the question of what I do give allegiance
to. I suppose to Earth, the only home I know. Also to open democracy, the best form
of government I've heard of (and the U.S. is not the only democracy in the world).
And to personal integrity.
Two Saturdays ago, friends and family gathered in Whittier, Calif., for
the memorial service of my 90-year-old mother-in-law, Helen O'Brien. At one time
a member of the Communist Party, she ceased that allegiance once she learned how
Stalin was behaving. During the '30s in the South, she helped organize the Southern
Tenant Farmers Union, an early integrated organization of blacks and whites. During
World War II, she and her husband, University of Washington sociology Prof. Robert
O'Brien, worked to find inland college openings for Japanese-American students who
were incarcerated in the West Coast's "relocation" camps. They were able
to get more than 5,000 young Japanese-Americans out of the camps and into college
during the war years.
With a masters degree in social work, Helen first worked in a Seattle
orphanage; and then for 23 years taught in and headed a public school unit for cerebral
palsy children in Whittier. She finished her last teaching stint with these children,
at age 80, filling in for one teacher for three months.
A Quaker, Helen participated in and chaired numerous committees
for the American Friends Service Committee, the social action organization that reflects
the spirit, goals, and processes of the Quaker religion. When she died this February,
she was serving on the Executive Committee for the Southwest and the Mideast Peace
Committee.
I think of intelligent, capable, wise Helen. I never saw a flag
around her home. As she was a traditional Quaker, I doubt she pledged allegiance
to any flag, because Quakers' allegiance goes to the light that exists in each person,
no matter what religion or nation. (Quakers don't stand up for judges, either; it
would imply that judges are more important than other humans.) And yet, I doubt anybody
who ever met Helen during her 90 years would question that she was one of those great
citizens and humans who, when they see problems, work in positive, effective ways
to solve them.
Any crowd reciting any pledge of allegiance to anything is faintly frightening
to me, because people acting as part of a group to which they are "loyal"
have often been willing to undertake inhumane, destructive, or shameful acts that
they never would have approved if they were thinking individually. However, throughout
the years, no one has ever acted belligerently toward me as I sit while they stand
to pledge allegiance to the flag; I am grateful for that. It is a testament to their
tolerance. I return their graciousness by thinking about fine things other than nations
to which I do offer my allegiance.
We can only believe what we truly believe. And we can only strive
to utter words that truly reflect what we love, and what we believe will help the
world that holds us all.
Mary O'Brien has worked as a public interest scientist for the
past 20 years. She can be reached at mob@efn.org
Back to Top
Where the Men Aren't
"Why aren't there any men here?" asks the 40-ish woman ahead of me in the
box office line. She's wearing a black velvet evening coat, sparkly earrings, heels.
Her date opens his wallet and buys their tickets to tonight's show -- a local up-and-coming
comedian (a lesbian).
Women's voices percolate through the small dinner theater. The
gentle timbre of their laughter rings out over the tinkle and clink of ice and forks.
Oregano-scented lasagna spices the air. Soft house lights wash over the few unfilled
seats and glint off gelled haircuts.
"Where are all the men?" she asks again, apparently not
noticing that she's with one, there's one selling tickets, and another one waiting
to usher them to their seats. I recognize a couple of guys in the audience and wave.
Seems like plenty of men here to me. The woman grows more agitated, "Where are
the men?"
"Who needs them?" I reply without thinking. My instinctual
reaction sounds hostile, but I didn't mean it that way. I swear. I've come off sounding
like a complete man-hater, but that's not it at all. My mental soundtrack plays folk
singer Malvina Reynold's "We Don't Need the Men," a good-natured ditty
inspired by women mill-workers who were getting impatient for the men to end their
checkers match and show up at the union meeting. What I meant to convey is the song's
message -- women don't need men around to take care of business. Malvina's song is
about affirming women's competence and self-reliance, not man-hating.
How can I clarify that all I meant is that we don't need men to
validate ourselves? I wish I could explain my thoughts to this perfect stranger:
You don't need men around to have a good time; it's OK to be places that aren't male-dominated;
you might even find it refreshing. Do men worry that so few women attend stockholders
meetings, technology conferences or, say, the US Congress? No!
But I'm magnanimous. Not all men are privilege-sucking power-mongers.
Some of my best friends are male. They can't help it; they didn't choose to be born
that way. I don't begrudge men who pay good money to see a lesbian comedian. But
neither do I worry about them being in the minority once in a while.
This little tirade goes on inside my head along with my instant
regret for adding to the poor woman's distress. I feel like a big oaf. Where do I
get off being so judgmental? I'm ashamed of myself for not having more compassion.
I want to explain or at least apologize. I hope she didn't even hear me, or if she
did, that it didn't register.
"Where are all the men?" she asks her date again. "What's
going on here? Is this comedian GAY or something?"
Her guy mumbles under his breath.
"No, it is NOT a stupid question," she argues while he
folds his change into his wallet and hands their tickets to the usher. She loops
her arm through his, telegraphing her uneasiness at having stumbled into a swarm
of lesbians.
The lesbian comedian is, in fact, absolutely hilarious and the
crowd is roaring. Most of the material is universal humor -- what, you thought lesbians
have only one thing on their mind? Hey, don't confuse us with men! No, haha, I am
only kidding.
But she includes a few inside jokes that might go over the heads
of those not in the know. Instead of just enjoying the show like everyone else, I
worry that another straight person is now completely alienated and convinced that
every low-down mean and ugly thing she's ever heard about lesbians is true. I crane
my neck to see how upset the poor woman has become. I spot her and her guy a few
seats away. I have not given her any credit for having brains. There they are, laughing
their heads off.
Sally Sheklow has been a part of the Eugene community since 1972
and is a member of the WYMPROV! comedy troupe. Her column, which began at EW, also
runs in several other newspapers around the country.
Back to Top
COST
OF HATE
Kudos to the Democratic Party's
stance against "hate radio" ("Reining in Rants," 4/4) but I think
we can impose the "Fairness Doctrine" without any help.
Progressive causes across the board are under an unrelenting
radio attack, complete with personal invective and good ol' boy insults,
every weekday for up to 15 and 18 hours a day!
The hate radio jocks would have us believe that this
is "free speech" but it isn't free at all. The microphone is utterly
controlled: first by the Hate Jockey, then by the station management,
then by the advertisers, and finally, by you. It 's our hard-earned
cash that pays for those ads that keep hate radio on the air.
Here in Lane County one out of every two households
has a registered Democrat in it. It seems crazy that any business
in Lane County could pay these hatemeisters to insult half
of their potential customers (and it's a lot more than half, I'll
bet) for three hours a day or more.
I'm in favor of free speech. And I'm in favor of people
using that free speech to tell an advertiser that they patronize who
advertises on hate radio: "I will not buy from your store as long
as you pay to have my beliefs insulted." That's fair. And that's free
speech.
Remember a few years ago when Proctor & Gamble
hastily junked their century-old moon & stars logo rather than
offend a few religious fanatics? Hate radio should be commercial suicide
to advertisers. You can make it happen.
Hart Williams
Eugene
CAPITALIST
NONVIOLENCE
Spruce Houser's March 28 Viewpoint,
"A Dividing Factor: an invitation to dialogue on nonviolence" was
not about dialogue but domination. Houser, like other "nonviolent"
authoritarians, wields the idea of nonviolence, over which he has
no monopoly, as a weapon of bourgeois morality designed to smear those
who question the middle class nature of the various failed movements
to end U.S. imperialism.
Houser claims that forcing everyone to follow the
dictates of the leaders of the movement for nonviolence is the "most
effective strategy," but his historical examples leave much to be
desired. Nonviolence, for example, was not the only strategy employed
to get the British out of India and likewise, nonviolence did not
end the war in Vietnam. America, of course, was defeated militarily
by a Vietnamese guerilla army.
Houser reveals his complete disconnection from history
when he states that "nonviolence rejects the us verses them dichotomies
and sees all of us enmeshed in a system driven by greed" (his
emphasis). Systems of greed do not drive themselves but are driven
by the ruling class. The ruling class is not an abstraction but
a real group of people who benefit materially from the exploitation
of their fellow human beings. The fact that Houser operates without
a theory of history makes it hardly surprising that he came up with
the fantastical idea that some sort of alternative to capitalism can
coexist along side the capitalist system. The end of imperialism,
authoritarianism, domination and exploitation can only be ended with
the total destruction of the capitalist system. This system had a
beginning and will have an ending.
Humans have struggled against work, the clock, bosses,
priests and exploitation for tens of thousands of years and they rarely
did it "nonviolently." The nonviolent movement is a product of the
capitalist system and a particular class within that system. History
has demonstrated that domination.
Michelle E. Loew
Eugene
PACIFIST-LIBERAL
BLEATING
EW is a slightly
hip consumer product that tells its readers how cool their "alternative"
consumption is. Its politics are an exact parallel: EW liberalism
says to its reader/consumers, "How elevated you are to be liberals
like us."
Pacifist liberal Spruce Houser, especially in light
of the growing and increasingly anarchist anti-globalization movement,
defends the basic status quo as a Green for Gore and gets regular
space in EW. Replying to his humorless smears, anarchist voices
get chopped up and somewhat buried (4/4) -- underneath yet more
pacifist-liberal bleating. No columns for us.
Houser's slander of me is as telling as his overall
campaign against resistance to the death machine. He shows how threatened
he is by the example of people all over the world who won't confine
their struggle to self-satisfied, protest-as-usual gestures. Even
here in the U.S., some -- unlike Houser -- are willing to
step up and risk privilege to fight for life.
John Zerzan
Eugene
GENES
PLUS
A comment on Hugh Massengill's
letter (3/28): Massengill implies that "mental illness" is not mainly
a question of genes. (No one really knows, yet.) He writes, "It is
devastating to be disabled with emotional pain, but to fix the problem,
don't we have to understand the cause" (sic).
Massengill confuses "phenotype" with "genotype." "Genotype"
is having genes for a trait, before environment comes into play. "Phenotype"
is "genes plus environment." For example, one strain of fruit flies
has wings that curl up if the temperature is lowered. Raise the temperature
and they can fly again. These insects' genotype doesn't become a phenotype
except when temperature comes into play.
Stress (emotions or environment) affect the body (including
the brain) adversely. A wedding is highly, though happily, stressful;
so is losing your job. Combat or child abuse are implicated in many
psychoses. Some people "crack" under stress (combat or child abuse);
some don't. The difference seems to be due to genes and quality of
upbringing. One thing MDs, biologists, psychiatrists, and torturers
know is that if anyone is denied sleep for 15 consecutive days,
they all will experience psychosis -- some permanently.
But Massengill is partially correct: A murderous flood
will leave an increase of psychosis in its wake. And a whole nation,
Germany, went berserk from 1923-45. Germany was a basket case in which
few could admit that Hitler was a screaming Teppichfresser
(carpet chewer). If the infantile Americans (6 percent of the Earth's
population) were deprived of their unfair "share" (40 percent) of
the Earth's resources, America might be a basket case, too. Sigmund
Freud warned that whites' racial hatred of blacks could destroy America.
Freud never looked over his shoulder at the Germans' hatreds of Jews,
which almost destroyed the world.
James Atlee Asher
Springfield
A
TIME TO RESIST
Spruce Houser's call (3/28
Viewpoint) for the absolute practice of nonviolent "resistance" is
as wonderful and inspiring to contemplate as it is utterly unrealistic
and dangerous to the survival and well-being of minority populations.
In particular, he seems to assume that an "us and them" stance is
a pure matter of perspective. Few oppressed populations adopt this
perspective by choice -- it may be forced upon them from without,
or it may be -- at least in the immediate term -- an inescapable
outcome of cultural or other differences.
It seems particularly instructive to consider the
ongoing plight of the Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of whom
practiced nonviolent "resistance" to illegal Israeli occupation of
their lands for years. As the Netanyahu government, in plain contradiction
to stated policy, encouraged armed settlers often openly expressing
fascist ideology to establish footholds throughout Palestinian lands
(see www.indymedia.org.il and related links), those opposed --
Israelis and Palestinians alike -- typically appealed to law,
good faith, and a common goal of peace by holding nonviolent demonstrations
and negotiations. Spruce, they failed.
The incursions continued, the provocations continued
and the dominant regional power (the IDF) trained and acting a
priori with an "us and them" perspective, reacted to Palestinian
protests with ruthless, devastating force.
What do you do when your very survival is threatened
by a superior force, and when the "us and them" divide is not of your
own making? What do you do when people you know, people you love,
when your culture or land, are being murdered, vilified and degraded
by a force over which you have no influence or control? You pick up
a stone, or a gun if you have one. You fight. You resist. You would
do the same.
Mark Post
Eugene
MIDEAST
MADHOUSE
I am writing to you from Amman,
Jordan. I'm an American working and living in the Middle East. I am
from Eugene but I've been living in Saudi Arabia for two years now.
I've been watching the news (unfortunately we only have CNN and BBC
in English over here). I'm trying to find out how America is responding
to the Middle East Crisis. All the people see over here is Bush and
the American media making one-sided statements. It is an embarrassing
time to be American and live here.
Is anybody protesting in Eugene? I know the people
of Eugene and I can't imagine they are "buying" all that our wonderful
media is feeding them. Please forward any info you can on the subject
so I can pass it on. People over here need to hear that not all Americans
think like Bush, that we don't all think that all Arabs are terrorists,
and that we are concerned and want to help.
Meanwhile I am a walking book of information. Let
me know how I can help and if there is any information that I can
provide. I am on my way to the U.S. Embassy. Currently the American
School in Amman is there with all the international students protesting
the U.S. involvement in the Middle East and U.S. support of Israel.
The children at the American school did not attend school today.
It is a madhouse over here. Israel has tanks and F16s
and Palestine has rocks and bombs tied to people. Something is definitely
wrong with that picture. The people are feeling desperate and are
worn completely down.
Sharon Carter
scartersaudi@hotmail.com
INFLATED
PAYROLL
The latest movement by a coalition
of groups supporting a law requiring a "living wage" for certain government
agencies, tax beneficiaries and their contractors is a big-time loser
for the taxpayer. The "living wage" is nothing more than a fancy name
for a super-inflated minimum wage and is based entirely on "feel-good"
economics with nothing substantial supporting it's implementation.
What the proponents of the "living wage" don't want
you to know is that ultimately the taxpayer (yes, this means you!)
is the one who ends up subsidizing the artificially inflated payroll.
What will happen is a small group of qualified bidders
will quote projects without the fear of competition, thus demanding
more profit on the project than they might have otherwise received
-- a practice affectionately known as "fleecing." The government
then has to go after more money from its only revenue source, Joe
Taxpayer, in order to pay the bill. So not only is the taxpayer going
to entirely fund this increased payroll, but we are also getting screwed
by the bidding process in that we are no longer getting the most for
our money since bidders aren't truly competing for the business.
The "living wage" activists promise that regulated
high wages will save the taxpayer money by eliminating some social
program demands and easing poverty. The true effect is the reverse.
If $14.28 per hour is the unskilled labor rate, what do you think
the union skilled rate will be? Now picture the inflation that will
follow this wage increase.
Now try visualizing the expansion of the program to
the private sector (the next logical activist step) and the corresponding
$8 McDonald's hamburger and $250,000 two-bedroom home next the railroad
tracks. Please contact the Eugene City Council (736-9041) and tell
them you do not support this "living wage" nonsense.
Tim Pollard
Springfield
SINGLE-PAYER
SOLUTION
Gender parity in healthcare
(cover story, 4/4)? The best way to have parity is to provide all
women, men and children with a single-payer Health Care For All--Oregon
comprehensive financial plan. Everyone will be covered with our plan.
But since women and children are the majority of Oregon's uninsured
or underinsured, it will benefit women and children most. The high
cost of paper shuffling by insurance and HMOs will disappear. We will
pay for our plan according to our ability to pay with a limit of 5
percent administrative cost. This will be a great and needed change
for taxpayers!
Elizabeth Pownall mentioned in EW that women
spend two out of every three health-care dollars and 90 percent of
all children with single parents live with their mother. I must add
that women are the most uninsured and most often face bankruptcy because
of unexpected health-care cost. I can also add that it is the cause
of 90 percent of elderly suicide.
The Oregon's Women's Health and Wellness Alliance
with two of our local participants, Sen. Susan Castillo and Kitty
Piercy, have worked to improve women's health in Oregon and should
be congratulated. We now need to gather all the signatures needed
to put our Health Care For All--Oregon plan on the ballot and
see that it passes in November! Sign on at the library, post office
or Saturday Market or give me a call to volunteer at 484-6145.
Ruth Duemler
Eugene
THE
GREED FACTOR
Politicians have been talking
about nursing home reforms and initiatives to ensure quality care
for the elderly. As a health-care professional I must tell you that
many of these measures are a worthless hindrance to quality care.
These measures do little but further complicate the
nursing care system. These measures only ensure that a difficult job
will be yet more difficult. Nursing assistants who are the foundation
of care are already overwhelmed by work, stress and low wages. They
do not need more bureaucratic technicalities to make their task more
complicated.
There are two major areas of reform necessary to bring
about high-quality care. They are not being properly addressed.
The single most important factor is appropriate staffing
levels. Nursing assistants are not allowed to do their best to supply
quality care simply because facilities require so much work in so
little time.
Staffing levels were mandated at a time when nursing
home populations consisted of a different class of patients. With
today's life-extending systems and insurance practices, nursing facilities
are crowded with people whose conditions are far worse.
Greed is the contributing factor. To make a fortune
on the suffering of others, facilities continuously cut corners to
increase profits at the expense of care. This is most evident in low
staffing levels which forces CNAs to cram residents into a tighter
and tighter schedule.
The capitalistic spirit might be appropriate for a
warehouse, but treating our elderly as though they were boxes on an
assembly line is a matter which needs rectification.
Stuart Banister
Eugene
DESPICABLE
BIODABBLING
It is not possible for George
W. Bush to do the right thing because of his genocidal war policies
involving numerous weapons of mass destruction and because of his
genocidal environmental policies. What is possible is hope that the
human race will survive and that the Earth's biosphere will survive.
You can think up your own worst-case scenarios. For despicable human
biodabbling and fundamentalist ethnic obsessions have made all doomsday
scenarios possible.
While terrorism is definitely immoral, the Bushian
calculus of terrorism is extremely fuzzy. All one needs to do to find
the biggest sources of terrorism is to follow/count the biggest flows
of money, the biggest flows of weapons and the biggest piles of bodies.
The biggest monsters shoot the biggest and most expensive arrows.
Will we survive with a president whose most important product is death?
Bob Saxton
Eugene
PERPETUATING
VIOLENCE
In September 2000, Ariel Sharon
deliberately ignited Intifada II to garner votes and win the election
-- with thousands of casualties still being left in his wake
-- yet America now sides with Sharon to perpetuate that violence,
saying Arafat cannot be allowed to use force for political gain.
The unfortunate bombing in Netanya caused Bush to
green-light Israel's racist agenda. Isn't it obvious such acts are
bound to happen since they happen every day? Why suddenly hold Arafat
responsible for a single event after witnessing uncontrollable violence
for 18 months?
Sharon knew Arafat couldn't control the violence.
Sharon knows America's "war on terrorism" can be manipulated to Israel's
advantage. Sharon had already destroyed Arafat's ability to track
down and incarcerate the extremists -- who refuse to answer to
Arafat in any case.
The Palestinians have been pushed off their land into
camps, categorized, forced into poverty; even their water is controlled
by the Israelis. Now Sharon conducts house-to-house searches, provoking
further bloodshed. I object to having my taxes used to support any
of these tactics.
There are many tragic ironies in life; none more disappointing
than watching an oppressed people be killed in camps by the very ones
who made the phrase "never again" mean so much to me as a child. Nothing
defiles the Holocaust more than the belligerence of the state of Israel.
America's claim of being a peaceful, compassionate
nation is stained by its complicity. The leaders of the U.S. and Israel
should obey the United Nations or face charges of high crimes against
the world.
Brian Bogart
Eugene
Back to Top
Table
of Contents
| News | Views | Arts & Entertainment
Classifieds | Personals
| EW
Archive
|