Category: Hometown Charlottesville

We had some interesting experiences on the peace vigil in town today. Much of the national media has been making a huge deal out of the killing of Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi. (Not so much mention of the woman and child reportedly killed in the building along with him… )
But of course, George W. Bush has also shown us his very public gloating over the killing of his foe. As one friend said to me: “You’d think they’d just won the Battle of El Alamein”…
So anyway, before I got out onto the street-corner with the peace signs today, I was wondering what kind of response we’d get from the passing (vehicle-borne) citizenry. And indeed, very unusually for our vigil these days days, today we did get two or three passing drivers who had evidently been hyped up by the media coverage and were eager to yell epithets at us and taunt us.
One of these guys– and yes, they are all men– was a well-known taunter from ways back who’s been notably quiet recently. Today, he rolled down his window and pushed his upper body half out of it so he could yell at us: “We got your buddy today! And you’re next!”
Poor guy. His face was contorted with anger. It seemed like he’d been saving up his bile for a long time and was just so very happy to have a chance to yell at us once again.
Zarqawi– “our guy”? That is so very sad and misinformed. (Not that this particular taunter was ever in a mood to come and actually talk to us about our views and affiliations. One time, maybe 18 months ago, he did get the guy who drives him home from work to stop a little way further down the street, and then he stomped back to our group and started berating a younger woman there… His buddy gently pulled him away.)
And as for his threat that: “You’re next!” Well, that has to come from a sick, delusional mind.
At one level, I am interested in this whole question of the psychological roots of violence– especially when, as seems so often to be the case, the violence is all bound up with a feeling of self-righteous anger. The urge to punish, pure and simple, is a huge leitmotif in the American psyche– whether it is “bringing justice to” Zarqawi by killing him outright (along with other individuals, including a child), or whether it’s capital punishment here at home.
This evening our state was due to be executing a borderline mentally retarded man called Percy Walton… The case went through many last-minute appeals and stops and starts until finally, just over an hour before the scheduled execution time, the Governor gave Walton a six-month stay of execution while his mental capacities are further examined by the state.
You see, here in Virginia, the second killingest state per capita in the entire union, you have to be sane enough to be “fit” to be executed in order to actually be executed. You could say, “a person would be insane to choose to be that sane!” Or you could say that the whole darn’ system is insane… But the root idea there is that the state requires that the executed person be in a position to fully comprehend what is about to happen to him, otherwise it’s not a “just” execution. Cruel and unusual punishment? I’ll say! Also, think about Percy Walton’s mental life this evening just a bit. If his cognitive functioning was sufficient that he understood what was scheduled to happen to him at 9 p.m. this evening, imagine what all his last 24 hours of dread were like… But then, the Governor gives him the six-month stay of execution; and somewhere along the way there state psychiatrists will come in and examine him. If at that point they find he is indeed “sane enough to be executed” then he has to undergo that entire lead-up-to-execution dread one time over again, in addition to the pain of the execution itself. Oh, ain’t “justice” a wonderful thing…
I digress. (Though not entirely.)
So there we were on the street corner this afternoon. Yes, we had two or three instances of clear hostility from drivers-by. But we also had a raucous cacophony of supportive horn-tooting in response to our peace signs! It seemed like the loudest ever. There were some extremely insistent honkers out there today… Including many trolley- and bus-drivers and once again a large city police vehicle.
My faith in the citizenry of our little corner of central Virginia was completely upheld. Bush may have had his few hours of gloating in the sun today. But based on the honking I heard on our street corner, the killing of Zarqawi has done little or nothing to persuade Americans that this war is headed in any kind of a desirable direction.
Bring the troops home.

A really moving thing happened during our regular Thursday afternoon peace
demo today.  There were about five of us there, stretched along the
same rim of sidewalk at the big intersection outside the Federal Government
Building in town where we always stand.  It was amazingly, gratifyingly
noisy, with a greater proportion of motorists “honking for peace” than I
remember, ever.  I was trying to shout a few words of conversation
over my shoulder with my friend Virginia, while also holding up my “Honk
for Peace” sign to the traffic moving in from the right and waving and establishing eye contact with the drivers as they approached. (Waving: friendly; often provokes a response in kind; plus
it draws attention to us standing there.)

I didn’t notice a guy who
was walking along the sidewalk towards us till he stopped right near me and
said, “Thanks so much for doing this, guys, I’m just back from there.”
   
“Just back?” I said.  “In the military?”

“Yes.  Got back two months ago.”

I turned to face him, reached out my spare hand, and grabbed him by the arm.
 “I am so glad you came back safe,” I said.

He looked as though he wanted to hug me, right there in the street.  But I was holding
two signs in my left hand.  Plus, well, hugging a strange guy on the
street didn’t feel right.  So I kept holding his arm.  “Where were
you?” I said

“Baghdad.”

“You doing okay now?”

“Well, it’s been hard finding work.  People don’t want to hire me when
they hear I still have a commitment to the military.”

“That sucks!  But how’s your head?  You having any nightmares?”

“Some.”

“So make sure you get the help you need.  Say, you want to stand here
with us a while?  We’ve got some spare signs.”

“I’m not supposed to.  I’m still in the reserves.  But I’m really
glad you folks are here.  That’s bad there.”

And then he walked away.  Afterwards, of course I wished I’d followed
him, got his story, talked a bunch more to him.  But we didn’t have
many demonstrators today (I guess because of the peace march we also held
last Monday.)  So I had just decided to stay on-mission there instead.

After he’d left, my friend Heather looked at me and said, “That was so
moving.  I almost cried.”  Me, I was biting back tears too.

… The general karma these days feels as though the head of anti-war steam
is starting to rise faster and stronger than ever before.  And
I don’t think it’s just here, in what some people call “the People’s Democratic
Republic of Charlottesville.”  After all, what I’m looking at here are
trends, over time…  Another example: three years ago, back at the beginning of the war,
when I put my pro-peace yard sign out next to our driveway, one of the main
things that happened was that people would steal it, or trash it, or rip
it out and throw it down the nearby swale…

Then yesterday, after 18 months of no anti-war yard sign (but a couple of  election
ones in there along the way), I planted out one of the spiffy new signs that
C’vill Center for Peace and Justice has been selling.  On one side it says
“End the war now” and on the other, “Wage peace.”  (This time, they
remembered to put the CCPJ web address at the bottom of the sign, too.  Great
work!)

So I put it out, and less than three hours afterwards I hear a ring at our doorbell.
 I go answer it, and there’s a heavyset looking white guy standing there whom I’ve never
met before.  “Excuse me, ma’am, but I wanted to ask where you get your
yard sign.  I’d really like one like it.”

“Ya… what?”

“I want to know how to get one.”

So I told him I just, actually, “happened” to have a spare one in the garage.
 Told him I needed to shut the door on him so the dog wouldn’t get out
on the street, and ran to get the spare sign from the garage to give it to
him.

Amazing.

We’ve been doing our pro-peace work consistently, rain and shine, ever
since before the war.  It feels great right now to feel such a strong
shift in our direction.

The Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice held a fabulous peace demonstration today. We gathered outside Thomas Jefferson’s Rotunda bulding at the north end of the University of Virginia “Grounds” and then walked the 2/3 mile along Main Street to the downtown. There were about 250 of us. (My friend David Slezak sat by the side of the road and counted us.)
I had found an old collection of our peace signs in the back of my garage. They augmented the ones we use every week on our Thursday peace vigil– and we also had some really snappy new “Wage Peace” yard signs that CCPJ is selling/distributing. It was kind of poignant to see some of the old signs that expressed horror over the fact that the number of US dead had reached “1,000.”
When we got downtown, our numbers swelled a bit more. Bill Anderson, the President of CCPJ, gave a great speech. Then a dozen members of the C’ville Women’s Choir sang some really moving a capella numbers. There was a bit more singing; a man from the local Native-American community spoke a bit, and that was about it.
My friend Sarah reminded us that at the peace demo this time last year there were 55 participants.
I have to say it feels so great to me, after a big trip like the one I made to Israel and Palestine, to come back home– home to Bill-the-spouse and the dog; home to the Charlottesville Friends Meeting (Quakers); and home to all my buddies in CCPJ.
The one notable problem in today’s peace demo, though, was the near-total absence of University of Virginia undergrads. There were a few grad students, but just about none of the younger students. What a pity… We had some great younger kids, though. A couple of them held up home-made signs saying “Bush is stinky.” I think our oldest participant was Jay Worrall, a stalwart of the local movements for social justice, inter-racial reconciliation, and peace who turned 90 earlier this month. (Jay is also a beloved member of our Quaker Meeting.)
Will there still be US troops in Iraq a year from now? I regret to say that I expect so. But if there are, then you can bet that CCPJ will be organizing another march.

Back in January 2003, when our city council here in Charlottesville, VA, was debating whether to declare the city a “City of Peace”, I went to the council chamber to speak, along with many other citizens. The main points I tried to make– in response to the argument that “issues of war and peace really aren’t the business of the city, but of the federal government”– were that this war is not going to be a cake-walk; that it’s going to be much, much more lengthy and expensive than anyone in the administration is telling us; that the cost of the war will be met in good part by the Washington enacting heavy cuts on basic social-service funding; and that the effects of that would be felt in every single city and county in the country…
Yes, I confidently (and corrently) predicted all those things.
We “won” our argument in city hall that evening. C’ville proudly became one of a couple of hundred cities across the US to declare itself a “City of peace.” At the national level, however, we lost. The antiwar movement was quite unable to prevent the Bushites’ invasion of Iraq…
Here we are, three years later.
I spent 16 of the past 18 hours working with a fabulous project we have here in town that provides very basic services to homeless people. This is run completely by a group of local churches– and our one Jewish temple, and perhaps some other non-Christian congregations as well. Basically, throughout the months October-April, the congregations take turns opening up their premises or classrooms for two weeks at a time to provide a hot dinner and overnight accomodation to up to 40 homeless men. PACEM, the coordinating group (Peole and Congregations Engaged in Ministry) does the registration process, provides the cots, and also a (very) little counseling and supplementary help to the guys, like job referrals etc.
This program runs in parallel with the larger one run in town by the Salvation Army in town. The Salllies have very strict rules. They don’t let in people with substance-abuse problems, and they subject their guests to heavy-duty proselytizing. (Oh, and they have an employment policy that explicitly prohibits the hiring of gay people.) PACEM has lower barriers for registration (though absolutely no illegal substances are allowed on-site), and it imposes no religious requirements on the guests.
Last night I cooked up a bunch of chicken pieces for the guests, helped with food-service, and then stayed as an overnight volunteer in the place the guys were staying. Our Quaker Meeting is doing this project as a team with a great Black Baptist church in town– First Baptist on West Main. They are well-organized, and bigger than we are. They have a lovely mid-19th century brick church. We serve the food in their basement Fellowship Hall. Then the guys sleep in two apartments that the church owns in a nearby building.
I only got a little time last night to spend talking with the guests. Many– perhaps most– of them are working men. Yet the amount they earn is quite insufficient to allow them to find rentals in our overheated real-estate market– even though quite a number of the men work punishing shifts that mean they can’t even get into their beds till past midnight, or else they have to start work at 3 a.m. or whatever…

Continue reading “On the home(less) front”

Yesterday, my friends Chris, Heather, and I were the only ones braving the winter weather to do the regular Thursday afternoon peace demonstration. That’s okay. We got LOTS of honks and I don’t think any of us caught pneumonia…
The weather was what forecasters describe as “a wintry mix.” There had been snow in the late morning, and by the afternoon it had turned to freezing rain. An ice storm was forecast for the evening…
In case you’re not familiar with “freezing rain”, here’s how it works. The air temp is always just at around freezing, having risen a tad from a long spell at sub-freezing. Rain falls. As it hits any objects– pine needles, utility wires, roofs, sidewalks, whatever– that is still at sub-freezing, it immediately freezes, causing a hard casing on tree boughs, pine needles (there’s a reason I mention them again), railings, sidewalks, etc. As the rain continues this casing gets thicker and thicker, or dangles down in the most amazing icicles, either way adding weight to said objects. If they are utility lines or pine boughs, they can rapidly become heavy, and break off and fall. A falling bough can of course also bring down some of the utility lines that loop along high above most of our streets here in C’ville.
As we stood there, of course it rained on us. There were very few pedestrians and relatively few drivers going past. The cars drove slowly along a nasty slushy roadway. One big city-run snow-plough came past and the driver gave us a great honk!
But of course as utility lines all over the city started snapping, there were fires and power outages in many places. Near where we stand is a fire station. The fire-trucks were called out no fewer than six times while we were there. And I have to confess we actually packed in our vigil quite a bit short of the normal 60 mins. duration.
Anyway, I drove Heather home through several dark, powerless neighborhoods. (She, Chris, and our friend Chip are three people who regularly come to the peace vigil by bike; but yesterday both she and Chris sensibly chose to get there by other means.) She and I did both have power in our homes, however. I had a nice warm dinner with Bill and my son Tar and settled down to plan for a nice evening’s blogging when–
You guessed. We lost power.
We lit the candles that we already had at hand. Bill and I played a few rounds of our favorite word games. Tar was in his room, I think working (by flashlight.) We all went to bed early. The power didn’t come back till around six hours later.
This morning, I ran a bunch of errands… sat down and researched and wrote a really long and informative JWN post about Australia… just about finished it… and then, I swear to God (or would, if I weren’t a Quaker) that I had even thought “Oh, I ought to save this” when I turned around and–
You guessed, the darned power went out again.
All that work lost.
Anyway, now I’m writing this on my laptop. He-he-he. It won’t get lost in a power-out his way, will it?
But here, for any of you who has had similar experiences, is the haiku I have taped up beside my desktop computer:

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Of course, I read that again this morning and said a long “Ommmm.” I guess writing “power-out” instead of “crash” would mean we’d lose the scanning there? But you lose the work you’ve done and failed to save just the same, in both events.
But at least a power-out has two huge advantages over a computer-linked “crash”:

(1) The power will come back on. You know that. You just need to wait.
(2) The power-out is nearly always not your fault. So you needn’t sit around feeling mad at yourself about it.

Well, apart from feeling mad at yourself for not having backed up your work, that is.
Okay, today the weather’s a lot warmer, and everything outside is dripping like mad. Yesterday I got a good upper-body workout shoveling snow (before the peace vigil.) Today, I guess I’ll go for a run.
So that’s the weather news from wintry old Charlottesville.

Okay, we have a solid inch of ice on our driveway and the connecting public sidewalk that’s been there for some days now, getting worse. I worked at the sidewalk some, yesterday. Now it’s time to join Bill the spouse and go out and hack at all the ice there with a shovel. Which reminds me it’s time to provide a link to this classic JWN post from February 2003.
What, indeed, if Dubya had to shovel his own sidewalks?

So okay, George Packer was here in Charlottesville today. I had lunch with him. Also miriam cooke. I had a good talk over coffee with her this afternoon.
I hadn’t met miriam before, though she and I have scads of friends in common. We swapped various tales about Oxford, Beirut in the “good old days”, Lebanese former husbands, etc etc.
And yesterday, on the peace demo, I met a new couple who’ve just moved to town. The male portion there is David Swanson. (He wrote about the peace demo here. Nice signs, huh? David’s right in what he writes there: we did get some great honking– again!– yesterday, including from some trash hauliers, several city buses, and a police cruiser…)
So okay, at the lunch today, it’s true that someone talked about “You know, the war that some people call the Civil War and some people call the War Between the States.” It’s true that one of the fellow lunchers was the former Inspector General of the CIA.
But in my book, all these things make the city a really interesting place to live.