Crossing into Privileged Spaces

Got privilege? Most of us in the United States do, actually. We got privilege*, and we have a tendency to walk through the world not even aware that it floats around us like a protective bubble. The problem with that bubble, being see-through, is it’s pretty hard to spot and even trickier to explain. Not only to other people, but especially to ourselves.

I am in the middle of watching 36 movies for a class about theological issues in film, and last night I watched the movie Frozen River. Frozen River is a gut-wrenching tale about the struggle for survival experienced by two single moms, one white, the other Mohawk, set near the Mohawk reservation in upstate New York. The women, both living under desperate circumstances, end up smuggling migrants across the Canadian border in the trunk of their car to make money to survive. The white woman, Ray, rationalizes her actions by explaining that she’s “no criminal” and that she’s only taking part in the trafficking of human lives in order to make the lives of her own children better and more secure. Lila, on the other hand, is so beaten down by the circumstances in her life that she simply can’t care; the smuggling becomes her only way of surviving with any dignity at all, as she sees it.

During their movements, whenever Ray gets agitated over getting caught by state troopers, Lila, who’s already under investigation by police and being watched by her tribe, calms her down by saying, “They won’t stop you, nothing can happen to you, you’re white.” And as the movie plays out, Ray discovers that even though she’s poor and a single mom, she still has one prize: She’s white, and she’s a U.S. citizen. She makes judgments about the migrants and Lila, and thoughtlessly threatens their lives with her actions, and receives few to no repercussions for her actions. When the police start investigating the human trafficking, she’s never considered a suspect. Because she’s white. She’s got that privilege going for her, and she cashes that privilege in until nearly the very end.

I thought this movie was a great example of how privilege works, and how fluid it is. Most of us, even those of us who don’t think we have it, have privilege of some kind, it just depends on where we are. Most of the time we only encounter our privilege, or lack thereof, whenever we cross into new spaces or territories, and in meeting new people who lived in circumstances that gave us privilege where the others have none. Ray encountered her privilege by crossing the frozen river with migrants in her trunk, and came to understand what privilege is: Ultimately, it’s what we can get away with (Check out this cartoon by the fabulous Keith Knight, reposted at Alas, a Blog, to see an example of what I’m talking about).

Privilege is difficult to discuss because it’s so fluid – so fluid that it not only changes from space to space but can even change from moment to moment. When we encounter our privilege, we too often remember the moments when we didn’t have privilege and use that as our frame to looking at the world. We think, perhaps, that “I am getting away with what I can here because I can’t over there.” But I think Knight’s cartoon, and Frozen River’s plot, provide space for us to think about our moments of privilege and the immunities that come with it, and wonder whether things might be different in those moments if the cast of characters were changed and the scene advanced.The frozen river looked a lot different from the perspective of Lila, or the migrants riding across it in the trunk.

What can we get away with? And if we are to live in a just world, should we get away with anything?

*Privilege, according to Webster’s, is “a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor ; especially : such a right or immunity attached specifically to a position or an office.” The word is often used when discussing racial inequities (i.e. white privilege) but exists in other social relationships as, for example, gender or sexual privilege.

Nothing to Report

If you’re my Facebook friend, you might have noticed my status update on Friday afternoon, in which I vaguely reported:

OK, fine! Nothing, there’s no color to report. Happy? (sheesh!)

I’m probably not letting any cat out of any bag if I actually reveal what I was talking about. Yes, I gave in to the many many (many!) inbox-forwarded suggestions that I write the color of my bra in my Facebook status. Without explanation whatsoever, just the color. And, of course, most of my female friends blithely posted their colors, ranging from “black lace all the way” to “beige” to “tiger striped.”

My report, I might add, got me kudos of all kinds, from my male friends who (rather salaciously, I might add) applauded my report, and from my female friends who congratulated me for being so bold for being honest that I was going au naturale.

To be honest: I spent the entire frigid morning snuggled under blankets in my pjs and with my laptop, working on PhD applications, and I simply hadn’t gotten dressed yet. So what, exactly, is so brave or titillating about truthfully stating the  state of (un)dress I find myself in for at least a third of every day? Trust me when I say that the only bravery here is my admission at what a lazy cuss I am, and the only inherent sexiness that can be found is in that honesty.

But that’s not the point of this post. I wonder: Do any of you (particularly the men) know why we gals were posting our bra colors?

The point was buried in the Facebook message: “It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness.” But did it at all? What might lingerie color have to do with breast cancer awareness? NPR reporter Shereen Meraji wondered about this and smacks all of us Facebook-trend followers with this point. She asks:

Is this another example of “slacktivism,” virtual activism with no real results?

How many of you were inspired to educate yourselves?

How many of you changed your Facebook status, but weren’t enticed to learn more about breast cancer?

No one seems to know where this campaign began. The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation, which promotes breast cancer awareness and research, praised the campaign for raising awareness but said it wasn’t linked to it. And the colorful reports weren’t limited to the U.S. but found in Ireland, England and Costa Rica as well. And the “campaign” doesn’t seem to have inspired any interest in breast cancer research or prevention, but it has inspired a lot of groups protesting the virtual flashing, reports Mary Carmichael at Newsweek:

The backlash against the campaign has already started. As of 1 a.m., the Facebook group “I Really Dont [sic] Care What Color Your Bra Is” had more than 1,000 fans (compared with 48 fans for “Bra Color As My Status”). Another group, “Not Posting the Color of Your Bra,” was advising readers to make donations of time or money to cancer societies or at least to refresh their statuses with medical facts. Personally, I liked the approach of science writer Maggie Koerth, who updated thus: “Post what your arteries look like and support a cure for heart disease! (What? It still kills more women than breast cancer.) I’m guessing that mine are slowly filling with sediment thanks to a genetic tendency toward high cholesterol!”

I halfway wonder whether the campaign wasn’t actually a well-meaning but pointless attempt to raise awareness on an important topic, but just an experiment in group manipulation and peer pressure. Or an invitation to jump on a conformist bandwagon with a saucy wink to the little exhibitionist that lives in a lot of us, and a lot of us took the bait. I reported my state of undress without thinking about the response it might get, but I also did it with a grin because I knew I was playing against the “black/beige/white/tiger striped” reports of all my friends. I was, I confess, showing off my nonconformity in my conformity. And now I have to really wonder what I was doing after all. And whether I’m doing it again just by talking about it here.

I was also amused by how many of my male friends, wittingly or not, took part in the Facebook phenom by reporting colors of their own. And why not? Here’s a little something you should know about breast cancer (and if you’ve stuck with me this far, you should learn something. After reading Meraji’s post, I was determined to learn something): Breast cancer is not just a women’s disease. It’s rare, but 1 percent of all cases of breast cancer occur in men. And in fact, former University of Oklahoma journalism instructor and Oklahoma Daily advisor Jack Willis wrote a book about his own struggle with the disease, Saving Jack, as a resource to help men suffering from breast cancer. Here’s a video of Jack talking about his experience:

So thanks for showing your support for the disease, guys. Whether you knew it or not.

The Color of Normal

“Whiteness” avers Melville, wrapping up his lengthy phenomenology of the ambivalence of whiteness, “is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors.” Blanc, blank. “… Such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows — a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.” To make whiteness visible is to learn to read its absent presence: concretely, its racial construction that — until we see it — colors myself as white while denying that I have color in the same stroke — truly a colorless all-color. –– Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep

I got a Hello Kitty toaster for Christmas. Normally it’s not my kind of thing, as the kawaii/cuteness of Japanese pop art has a tendency to really get on my nerves (add that to all the people in my life who, for whatever reason or another, love Hello Kitty and assumed that because I’m Japanese I must love it, too and come rushing up to me with their Hello Kitty stuff to ask me about my own collection … yeah, whatever). But there was something about this pink-bowed toaster that really delighted me: that the silly thing leaves a Hello Kitty design in your toast.

We also haven’t had a decent toaster in this house in ages, so I was excited just to get a toaster. But anyway.

So on Boxing Day morning, I was all excited to test out my new kawaii toaster. This is what I was expecting:

This is what I ended up with:

You can kind of make out a vague Hello Kitty-type shape there, and the image doesn’t get any clearer no matter how much you burn the toast. I was, to say the least, really disappointed (yes, I want a consumer-product cartoon character in my toast! Or maybe if there’s going to be an uncooked spot in my toast, I’d like it to at least look like what it’s supposed to be). Then I looked at the picture on the box and realized: For best results, one probably must use white bread.

That got me thinking about the assumptions that we make about what’s normal, what’s not, what’s assumed to be the canvas upon which we draw our understandings of the world, and what exists outside that in the realms that we call “exotic” and “other.” My normal, as far as breakfast bread goes, is whole wheat and multigrain; for me, white bread is “exotic” and very far outside the realms of my normal. I don’t eat white bread; we’ve always eaten wheat or whole grain breads in my family, so I grew up not really caring for the taste of white bread. I’m not sure that the designers of this and other design-burning toasters were making that assumption on the normalcy of breads  — that most people (or at least those who want Hello Kitty patterns in their morning meal) eat white bread.  But it’s very likely that white bread really is the perfect bland, tasteless, colorless perfect canvas for such designs (did I mention that I don’t care for white bread?), hence the resulting toaster.

But it at least brings up the question of what we assume passes for normal, or what our assumptions for the parameters of “normal.” What does our “normal” look like? Or a better question might be: What does “normal” look like to people who educate our children or craft our public policies?

Or design our technology.

I recently came across this video in which two computer retailers demonstrate the parameters for “normal” on some HP facial-recognition software:

It’s not that this software, which Desi (the guy in the video) jokes about, is necessarily racist; racism is a complex issue that involves structures of power and abuse. However, what’s going on in this video is one of the foundations of racism, which is an assumed privilege of what’s “normal” — that the software designers set white faces/skin color as the parameters for normal. There may be a standard or a default that’s assumed, unquestioned, unrecognized, nearly invisible until something brings it forth to be seen. In this case, whiteness becomes the default, an odd mixture of colorlessness that is itself constructed the color of normal against which everything else must justify itself.

As innocuous and harmless as it was, my toaster experience woke me up a bit to the assumptions I have in my life, and makes me wonder about what other assumptions are at play in my life. And reminds me I need to be on the lookout for them.

Crying out for Humanity

“This is a matter of all humanity and all living things — all their past, their present, their future. It is not a question of loyalty to one group or one country, but all living things from this time on. It affects the existence not only of man, whose worth may be debatable, but of all life upon the earth. You have a duty to the whole world, not merely to one segment of one species. … I tell you that there will be an international agreement, and very soon. It will not come from the big nations where rivalries are strong. So the little nations must force them into such a compact and see that they abide by it.” — Pierce, in Leonard Wibberley’s The Mouse That Roared

This past weekend, Tuvalu delegate to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen Ian Fry made an emotional cry for help to the people of the world, particularly the U.S. The chief climate negotiator for the 12,000 people of the tiny island republic pleaded for world leaders to make agreements to save not only his nation, but the other small, low-lying island states in the world and to protect them from being inundated by rising seas caused by climate change. Christine Russell at The Atlantic quoted Fry:

“I woke up this morning crying, and that’s not easy for a grown man to admit,” Ian Fry, the chief climate negotiator for the 12,000 people of Tuvalu, told hundreds of delegates gathered in the conference’s Bella Center on Saturday. “The fate of my country rests in your hands,” he said, reportedly choking up as he spoke.

Russell compares Tuvalu’s dire situation to that of canaries in coal mines, and wonders whether large countries, such as the United States and China, who are the world’s largest producers of global warming-causing gases, are willing to go the distance in order to curb emissions, particularly since curbing emissions would cause large polluting countries to take huge political and economic hits.

The United States and the other large countries of the world — the ones creating the most pollution, the ones causing the most harm to the ecology of the planet and have the most protection from the fallout of that harm — are standing at a crossroads toward the future. They can either lean toward protecting business and political interests in order to keep or jockey for more power and position … or they can err on the side of humanity, on the caring relationships built on regard for other people — particularly those without power — that are the hallmarks if what really make us human. They also can either look to keeping the status quo or embarking on creativity that would benefit us no matter what might happen with the climate — even if it turned out that the climate scientists were wrong and that the world were not in peril.

Michael Westmoreland-White (hat tip to Bruce Prescott @Mainstream Baptists!) called the U.S. and other large, emissions-producing countries to meet this challenge, using Pascal’s Wager as a guideline. He wrote:

Consider:  If we gamble that the climatologists who warn of global warming and catastrophic climate change because of greenhouse gasses are right, what follows? Well, we have to spend much money and make major changes in our industrial processes and lifestyles that are potentially economically and socially disruptive. It will cost to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 80% by 2050, for example. And, if the warnings were overblown this would be a negative. But, even if fears of global warming are exaggerated (something I don’t believe–I think the evidence is overwhelming that, if anything, it’s happening faster and with more severity than we believed even a few years ago), the changes made to stop it will leave us with many benefits:  Cleaner air (because greenhouse gasses are also major air pollutants) with all the benefits that makes to health in society; energy independence since every society can switch to clean, renewable sources of energy (wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal, hydroelectric, perhaps others not yet discovered); greater national security and a more stable world (since the politics of oil will not intersect the volatile countries of the Middle East and central Asia); better public transportation (high speed trains, light rail, cleaner busses, etc.) which helps business and city planning; renewed manufacturing and ‘green collar’ jobs that cannot easily be outsourced; less destruction of the natural world in the frantic search for fossil fuels (the end of “mountaintop removal” and strip mining for coal which is destroying the Appalachian mountains in KY, VA, TN, WV, and NC at an alarming rate; no catastrophic oil spills killing sea life, etc.) ; cheap, clean sources of power which can lift much of the world out of poverty; healthier lifestyles (less consumption in the rich West, more walking and bicycling; eating local foods that don’t have to be transported thousands of miles, etc.); less habitat destruction of other species in the frantic search for oil and coal.

All of these things are good to have even if the threat of global warming proves to be overblown.

This makes great logical sense to me, and if I were to weigh in with the heart of a philosopher, a theorist, an economist — this is the same argument I would make toward why the U.S. and other nations should err on the side of curbing climate change.

But I have another piece of my heart to consider, that comes out of my ethics and understandings of the world that say we are only find our humanity in how we treat others. We have power only through how we engage it in our dealings with those who have none. In the U.S., most of us are sheltered from the most devastating effects of the already-changing climate. But can we turn a blind eye and deaf ear to our sisters and brothers across the world who are watching the waters rise to take away their homes, their ways of life, their livelihoods? Will we choose power and comfort over the safety and surviving and thriving of our fellow human beings?

I saw the 1959 movie The Mouse That Roared for the first time the other day, and it surprised me in ways that only classic movies that were ahead of their time can do. In that hilarious movie, a small country inadvertently wins a war against the U.S., and in doing so obtains a mega-weapon that they use to force world peace by making large countries with nuclear weapons disarm. They reason: The small countries know that they are dependent upon the larger ones, that their fortunes are tied up with the larger ones; the larger ones don’t ever feel that way. It’s time the larger countries understood that.

When it comes to climate change, we don’t need a single country to hold a weapon against us to force us to understand that unless we hang together, we hang separately. The threat exists and is real, and it already is menacing those around us. What will we do? I took heart from Cornel West’s words, from this autobiography, in which he prophetically lets us know what we need to do to entrust not only the safety and well-being of the world, but also our precious humanity:

Back to New York for a CNN-televised interview with The New York Times in which I lambaste Imperial America and the Ice Age of Indifference that casts a cold eye on the least of these, the most vulnerable among us — the orphans, the elderly widows, the relatively helpless children, and goes on to embrace poor people, working people, people of color, victims of violence, domestic, or international. One wants to look at the world continually through the lens of those people you want to be in solidarity with. This solidarity is manifested best by being part of activities connected to the worlds and experiences of the least of these.

I prayerfully ask our leaders to consider these acts of solidarity — to stand with Tuvalu and other countries whose fortunes are tied with ours — in considering climate policies for our future.

Prizing Peace

In a decision that surprised most of the world, the Norwegian Nobel Committee recently awarded U.S. President Barack Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, citing his efforts to reduce nuclear arms, open dialogue with the Muslim world, and to emphasize diplomacy. Commentators and pundits have criticized the committee’s decision, saying that the president, who has been in office less than nine months, should not accept a prize dedicated to peace while his country is involved in two wars overseas. The Nobel committee responded to the critique, saying that the award is meant to encourage the work toward peace and dialogue that the president has accomplished so far, in hopes that it will continue. What do you think about President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize? What message would you send to him about the award? Writers at The Xenia Institute talk about their reactions to the news. Read more about the prize in A Closer Look.

An Open Letter to President Obama  |  Clint Collins

By the time this is published, I may be one of the last people remaining on the planet who has yet to commend or eviscerate you for your selection to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  In spite of that, I hope you will accept my heartfelt congratulations on your receipt of this great honor. … Yet in spite of my admiration for your globally oriented approach to diplomacy and governance, I feel compelled to speak on behalf of those who today cannot share in Alfred Nobel’s vision of “fraternity between nations.”  The absence of any specific reference to the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan in your acceptance announcement casts a conspicuous and disappointing shadow across an otherwise inspiring response.

What Does Peace Look Like?  |  Barbara Schwartz

I’ve spent the morning cracking jokes about Obama’s win, but more than anything I’ve been looking at my framework for what accomplishment is, and how important it is that I actually “see” progress or action in order to verify success. That there must be something tangible and measurable before I can classify something as “real.” And then it makes me wonder how we measure peace, human rights, justice and democracy. I know we can create criteria by which to measure these ideas, but how static are they, and how malleable are they to our contexts? At what point does the idea or the ideals of peace cross into action?

Hoping for Peace  |  Chris Moore

Maybe this award is the best thing … maybe it has just raised expectations so high on President Obama that it will be a detriment. At least it seems like an endorsement of the ideals he represents – the ideals of dialogue, humility and justice … the ideals that focus on the far shoreline of hope … though I don’t count him (or any human being) as having a prefect score on those accounts. Perhaps it could encourage him to seek a different path in Afghanistan, or to pursue peace between Israel and Palestine with more vigor, I don’t know. In fact, I really have no idea how anything is going to work out. I just know that from my vantage point in the boat, the stars are very bright.

What Does Peace Look Like?

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

For the second time in a little over a year, news about Barack Obama woke me up and made me say, “Seriously? What the …?”

Last year I signed up to receive a text message from the Obama campaign so that I would know THE VERY SECOND that Obama announced his choice for running mate. When my cell beeped at 2 a.m., I picked it up, read “Joe Biden,” and went, “What, really? Seriously?” Not that I don’t like Joe Biden, (“Can I call you Joe?”) but that wasn’t the news I was expecting.

About 5 a.m. this morning, my iPod Touch, which is installed with the Associated Press news app, made the urgent “breaking news!” sound from its spot beside the bed. I rolled over, hit the button and read, “U.S. President Barack Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize.”

Seriously? What the …?

I mean, I support the guy, I voted for him, but … really? Did The Onion hack into the AP mainframe and hijack its breaking news bulletin?

You’ve probably heard the usual suspect list of protests: He’s only been in office nine months, what’s he done? Has he even had time to do anything? And what about the other candidates on the short list (as far as we can guess, anyway), who are out there in the trenches of the world who are working for peace? Maybe Obama really got the award because he’s not GWB.

And that’s exactly what was going through my mind when I read the news. I’ve spent the morning cracking jokes about Obama’s win, but more than anything I’ve been looking at my framework for what accomplishment is, and how important it is that I actually “see” progress or action in order to verify success. That there must be something tangible and measurable before I can classify something as “real.” And then it makes me wonder how we measure peace, human rights, justice and democracy. I know we can create criteria by which to measure these ideas, but how static are they, and how malleable are they to our contexts? At what point does the idea or the ideals of peace cross into action?

I’m still thinking about this as I wade through all the various news reports and analysis about the prize — the critics who say it’s worth nothing, the critics who say it’s worth so much that Obama should decline. If anything, I’ve gotten a chance to think about how I look at the world and the benchmarks I’ve established to help me measure it, and try to deconstruct how they got installed. How do I measure peace? How do I measure the worth of work for peace and justice?

I begin to wonder if I have defined peace work so narrowly in order to make it impossible for me to participate at all. What if it’s as easy as speaking the words, broadening my mind and being open to the possibilities of peace in new ways? It could be that I’ve been missing out on the opportunities simply by defining it out of my sight.

That’s where I am so far. I’ll leave the political critiques of whether Obama is an accomplished enough peacemaker for those who are better equipped. Right now, I’m thinking about the possibility that simply redefining for myself how peace starts may be a first step into it.

Nicaragua Journal | Agüita

Que el agua es de todos, no del mejor postor

Aterciopelados, Agüita

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

Sitting here right now, writing this blog, I am leisurely sipping from a 32-ounce water cup that I drew from the kitchen faucet. Since that faucet is located in Norman — instead of Oklahoma City, which has some of the best-tasting tap water in North America — this cup of water has a slightly sour taste that isn’t very pleasing to my palate. But it’s pure and it’s free of bacteria, parasites, chemical waste and industrial toxins that can cause life-threatening illnesses like cholera, diarrhea and cancer.

Most of the world isn’t this fortunate.

According to Good Magazine:

• One-sixth of the world’s population does not have access to clean water;
• Every minute, four people across the world die from a water-related disease;
• Diarrhea caused by water-borne diseases kills 4,100 people per day; 90 percent of those deaths occur in children under the age of 5.

I spent my time in Nicaragua with one eye on the work that I was doing and the other on my ever-present plastic water bottle, which served not only was a source for drinking water, but also for teeth-brushing and some hand-washing. Any water that didn’t come from that water bottle, or the 5-gallon vessels of purified water we bought at the corner stores, I had to look at with suspicion and avoid, lest I end up with any number of water-borne ailments.

Again, most of the world is not this fortunate, to be able to shell out $1 a liter for a day’s drink. Neither are most of the people in rural Nicaragua.

The irony, of course, is that parts of Nicaragua are very wet and water-covered, at least during the rainy season. According to Public Citizen, water covers about 10 percent of Nicaragua’s surface, and the water table has been easily reachable through hand-dug wells. However, over the past 20 years, environmental degradation, pollution and a rising population that’s taxed the available water has threatened the country’s ability to provide clean water to its people. Only about half the country is able to access clean water; in rural areas, only a quarter of the country as clean water. Only about a third of the country has sewage coverage. In addition, what water is available that is available is being scooped up by multinational firms, backed by  International Monetary Fund policies, that are privatizing water access.

Clean water access is one of the the main projects that JustHope is working on together with Chacraseca. The community has been working on getting clean water to all its 8,000 residents for about nine years. Thanks to a $250,000 grant from the Austrian government and fundraising efforts by JustHope partners, Chacraseca was able to buy pipeline, professionally drill two wells and build clean water tanks in order to provide water to all but 200 families in the sector. Community members — women, men and children together — took part in the work, from digging trenches for the pipelines to building and installing the tanks. JustHope is currently raising the last few thousands of dollars to bring water to the rest of the community.

For those who have had taps installed at their homes, getting clean water is as easy as turning a knob. The final tests on the last wells took place while I was in Chacraseca. The water in those wells, purified through chlorine, were finally deemed safe to drink. I took a sip from a plastic bottle that had been filled at the well; it was sour and left a terrible taste in my mouth, but it was drinkable, and it was safe.

For those who don’t have faucets at their home, clean water is neither safe nor easily accessed. At the home our group was helping to build, in the remotest part of Chacraseca, the family still got its water the old-fashioned way: via a single well that served the entire neighborhood, drawn 20-gallon bucket by 20-gallon bucket. It takes a team of oxen, hitched to the pulley system, to pull the water up from the water table more than 200 meters below the earth. One man led the oxen down a long trail so he could haul the bucket up to the surface; another man tipped the water-filled bucket into a cistern, where the women of the neighborhood could then draw water for their homes’ use. The mother of the family whose house we were helping build showed us how she transports the water, in 2-gallon buckets atop her head. I gave the chore a try; I could barely lift half a bucket, and the weight of it left a painful bruise on the top of my head that I felt for days. This water, of course, wasn’t drinkable without purifying it first, and the family, which included two small children under the age of four, had no way of purifying it.

Access to clean water is only part of Nicaragua’s water problem. The other is water privatization, in which for-profit companies take over a nation’s water supply, create infrastructure for water delivery, but charge a high price for what was previously free. The good part: clean water; the bad: water only goes to those who can now afford it. Water privatization for many developing countries is often a condition of a International Monetary Fund development loans. According to Jennifer Schwab, director of Sustainability for Sierra Club Green Home:

The shrinking supply of clean drinking water worldwide is on a collision course with its relentlessly growing population. And in a number of developing world countries such as Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua, Angola, and others, private for-profit corporations are taking over the water supply and charging high prices for this previously free commodity. In many cases, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are behind this strategy.

The world’s three leading for-profit water firms — Vivendi, Suez and Thames — would counter that they are installing an infrastructure to support a supply of clean fresh water that otherwise would not be built by the governments of these under-financed nations. They also provide jobs and inject significant sums into otherwise struggling local economies.

So who is right? Nobody can charge citizens for the air we breathe. Should water be for sale or is it a basic human right? Is it possible for sustainable social policies and multinational, public companies to coexist? I think the answer is no. If Vivendi, Suez or Thames invest the capital to install the clean drinking water infrastructure and their business model is to sell drinking water, how can they be required to give it away to local citizens? This is the quandary we face especially in the developing world. Company CEOs and Board Members will argue they have a responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits, while local governments have a responsibility to their citizens. These poor countries, most often targeted for privatized water systems, need infrastructure and money to provide clean drinking water. Private companies feel that by providing these essentials, they have the right to charge for water consumption, regardless of the consumer’s socioeconomic status.

The IMF has pushed for water privatization in several parts of Nicaragua, including the capital Managua, Jinotega and León, which is three miles away from Chacraseca, and the cost of water increased water prices by 30 percent in Managua. The public policy nonprofit Public Citizen lays out the the IMF and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs for Nicaragua that include plans for water privatization and an increase in residential water prices here. The report states:

The government of Nicaragua has been responding slowly to IMF and Inter-American Development Bank pressures to increase cost recovery and privatize water services. There are a variety of domestic political obstacles, from the role of water utilities in the political patronage system to popular resistance to increased water fees, that have slowed the externally imposed water sector “reform” program. Gaining popular political acceptance of the water privatization agenda will not be simple. There is tremendous resistance and social opposition to increased tariffs for water and social anxiety about relinquishing control of major portions of the country’s water system to foreign multinational corporations. Water, like food, air, or land, is basic to human survival. The basic injustice of water fees that are unaffordable to the majority poor population is very clear to most Nicaraguans.

To be honest, before I went to Nicaragua, I never thought about how much water I use each day, and how that access to all that water might be a justice issue. According to Good Magazine, the average North American resident uses more than 100 gallons a day; the average person in a developing country uses about 1.3 gallons a day, a little less than a single flush of a low-flow toilet in the U.S. Curtailing my water use might be better for the environment, lower my own bills, and even help ensure the supply for those in my immediate area. But are my water concerns related to those in Nicaragua?

Public Citizen points out that eventually, all water problems will be local:

In the U.S. we have taken for granted access to basic water and sanitation services. However, policies promoting privatization and increased cost recovery are creeping into the wealthy countries as well. Recent tax cuts and the U.S. “War on Terrorism” will make in unlikely that water and sanitation infrastructure will receive the public subsidies sufficient to maintain operations and hold the line on consumer water fees. According to the U.S. Water Infrastructure Network (WIN), an additional $23 billion a year is needed in the U.S. to meet environmental and public health mandates, and to replace the aging infrastructure. Relying just on utility rate increases will cause consumer bills to double or triple, according to WIN.

As a result, cash-strapped municipal, country and regional water system managers will likely have to face hard choices, including the temptation to sell or contract operations to private multinational water corporations. In addition, new rules proposed by the World Trade Organization (WTO) services agreement may help private investors access government subsidies and ease the entry of foreign private water companies into the U.S. market. The policies of water privatization and increased cost recovery may soon begin to hit home in the U.S.

So paying attention to the impact of water privatization in developing countries like Nicaragua is a smart thing for those of us in the U.S. to do, to watch for when these policies might begin affecting us. But there’s more to it than that. As a person who cares deeply about justice and who tries to participate in the creation of a just and sustainable world, the issue of water access has to be understood as something more than either profit or how they might affect me individually. Access to clean, safe water has to be seen as a human right, because water, like air, is something we must have in order to live. Jennifer Schwab calls for the world to take a middle path in managing water access and costs, finding a way to provide clean affordable water to every person while still providing the companies that create the infrastructure a reasonable profit. Perhaps that is the answer; how that might be implemented, however, is anyone’s guess. And whatever happens, it must happen justly.

Right now, all I know is I stand with the quote in the epigraph of this post: May water belong to everyone, and not the highest bidder.

Watch …

For the past few years to mark World Water Day, GOOD Magazine has created these videos about water inequality and the need for safe, clean drinking water worldwide.

Praying for Grace

I got tapped to pray in public recently, a simple blessing before an afternoon meal. Which shouldn’t be an odd thing to happen for a seminary student. After all, what else could I possibly be learning in what my friend Richard calls “Jesus School”?

The thing is, I don’t pray in public.

When I declared this to the person making the request of me, a look of utter shock crossed her face, as if I’d said, “I kick puppies in the street on a regular basis.” How, she asked me later, do I manage as a minister if I don’t pray in public?

Well, I don’t, I’m strictly a student and academic, but since I love working with the church, it’s probably something I should remedy in the near future. The thing is, I’m just not comfortable with public prayer. Perhaps I took the Sermon on the Mount a little too seriously, where Matthew records Jesus as saying:

‘When you pray, don’t act like phonies. They love to stand up and pray in houses of worship and on street corners, so that they can show off in public. I swear to you, their prayers have been answered! When you pray, go into a room by yourself and shut the door behind you. Then pray to your Father, the hidden one. And your Father, with his eye for the hidden, will applaud you. And when you pray, you should not babble on as the pagans do. They imagine that the length of their prayers will command attention. So don’t imitate them. After all, your Father knows what you need before you ask.’ (SV)

My discomfort with prayer stems, I think, from my background growing up in the Roman Catholic church. My home church was a conservative German church whose few concessions to Vatican II did not include encouraging home Bible-reading or improvisational prayer. Our prayers came straight from the church prayer book, and most of the ones that I learned were tied to the rosary. The prayers that I learned and which still roll off my tongue with little prompting are those that I learned by rote, filed with descriptions of a kingly, hierarchical God and an atonement theology that has damaged my heart more than it has saved it. If I am honest, I have to admit that I am loathe to pray in public because I’m afraid of betraying myself to the metaphors of my embedded theology that come out of my mouth whenever I attempt to pray aloud.

Since exiting the Roman Catholic Church and entering Protestanism, I’ve paid close attention to how people pray. I’ve noticed certain phrases that always seem to enter into prayers for a specific circumstances, like grace before meals or confessions, certain structures that are followed each time, rolling off the tongues of the prayer leaders as prettily as a river over the rocks. If not embedded in childhood, obviously, they’ve become embedded since.

I recently learned that I’m not the only hapless practitioner out there. A few weeks ago,  New York Times Magazine contributor Zev Chafets detailed his quest to learn how to pray — primarily in private, not necessarily in public. Chafets learned from a Reform rabbi the differences in prayer techniques:

“Really, when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!”

“That’s it?”

“Yep. Wow! are prayers of praise and wonder at the creation. Oops! is asking for forgiveness. Gimme! is a request or a petition. Thanks! is expressing gratitude. That’s the entire Judeo-Christian doxology. That’s what we teach our kids in religious school.”

“What about adults who want to learn to pray?”

“I tell them to start with prayers of Thanks! That’s what Christians call ‘grace.’ Everybody has something to be grateful for.”

Chafets says that as the U.S. continues on its trend of becoming “more spiritual than religious,” more people are opting for “Wow” prayers than “Oops” ones. He also heaped high praise on the “Gimme” style of prayer as demonstrated by a small evangelical church in West Virginia, whose petitions to God were uttered in regard to someone who really needed them.

Maybe the problem I have with prayer is that I’m a fairly quiet person anyway, and even in my prayers, which fall more on the Wow side than anything, tend to be silent inhalations focused on achieving an attentive recognition. Because I believe like Shug Avery says in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple:

God love everything you love — and a mess of stuff you don’t. But more than anything else, God love admiration. … (God’s) just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. … People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back … It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect. … Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

I’m still trying to figure out how to embed that theology into my tongue, so that I can share it out loud. Like learning any new language, it’s a process filled with bad grammar and clumsy phrases that improve over time in order to effect connection and to find grace not just with God, but also to maneuver through our communities of faith and praxis without tripping and falling down too much.

In the end, I sucked it up and led the lunchroom in a brief statement of Thanks!, maybe with a Wow! included. I thought about the prayer-by-rote I used to say before my meals, and about what I wanted to say to God to show that appreciation I experienced in a world of too much and too little. In the end, the prayer was short, but honest: “Creator God, bless us with the bounty of your creation. Amen.”

Nicaragua Journal | ‘Dirty Water of Imperialism’

The degree to which Nicaragua in the 1990s was obliged to yield its economic sovereignty to the international lending and donor community was brought home to met he day after the 1996 general election by an observer group, of which I was a member, with an individual heading one of those institutions in Nicaragua. When asked what he thought of the results of that election, he responded that either outcome would have been the same to him, since neither Aléman nor Ortega would have had many options concerning how to run the economy. After elaborating on that point, he then confided that his institution had an economic plan for Nicaragua and that he had arranged President-elect Aléman to come to his — the international bureaucrat’s — office to see it.

Thomas W. Walker, Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle

By Barbara Schwartz
Editorial Director
The Xenia Institute

Leave the United States and order a Coke, and you’ll probably find that it has a different taste. I drank one Coca-Cola during my eight days in Nicaragua, at a small restaurant (actually, it was a table set up on the front porch of a woman’s home in a Managua neighborhood), and enjoyed the taste of Coke made not with high fructose corn syrup but cane sugar.

I’m not much of a soda drinker; under normal circumstances I drink water. But in a place where most of the water is not readily drinkable, when you realize that the 20-oz. bottle of water you bought at the corner store has to last until your next trip to the store, which is three miles away and you’ll have to walk to get there, and it’s got to serve for everything — from quenching your thirst to brushing your teeth — you hunt around for other options. I ended up drinking a lot of Toña, one of two beers made in Nicaragua.

The pulperias — the small locally run corner stores — were stocked with both Coke and Pepsi, but I didn’t have the heart to drink one anyway. If you walk into a cantina and order one of these drinks, I was told, you don’t order them by name; you ask for some “dirty water of imperialism,” a reference to the political and economic hegemony the U.S. holds over the Western hemisphere and a good portion of the world.

In Nicaragua, the economic divide between the U.S. and the two-thirds world is palpable. Nicaragua is a country of stark economic division, with one of the highest degrees of income disparity in the world. It is the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti, according to the BBC), with the majority of its people living on less than $1 a day. In rural areas, electric service is spotty; if there’s running water, it’s not necessarily potable. The house we helped build, in the most rural sector of Chacraseca, was built with concrete blocks and included a concrete floor, but when you consider that the family had been living in a tiny shelter cobbled together out of salvaged tin tied to branches taken from the forest, that tiny concrete house seems almost palatial.

Our small group of builders reached that site every day after about a half-mile hike up a dirty path; the road, if you could call it that, was too bad — filled with deep ruts and sharp volcanic stones — for our van to make it all the way. Carts pulled by donkeys or oxen, however, didn’t have too much trouble.

A phrase I heard quite a bit during and after my experience in Nicaragua, especially by people who have made the journey themselves, is, “We may have material wealth, but they are rich in community.” But this division isn’t a natural one that keeps the U.S. on one side and Nicaragua on the other; it didn’t just shake out that way through a Guns, Germs and Steel history. Among other things, it’s national external debt, and it’s global economics.

Nicaragua’s external debt currently stands at about $6 million, reduced in the last few years from about $6 billions dollars after the nation entered the World Bank’s Highly Indebted Poor Countries program that canceled 80% of Nicaragua’s debt. This works out to about $1,000 for every person in Nicaragua. That original debt, though exacerbated by the civil war and environmental disasters like hurricanes and volcanic eruptions and from Nicaragua’s inability to pay the interest on those loans, came from bond payments, bank bankruptcies and structural adjustment programs imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Witness for Peace says Nicaragua spends about 25% of its annual budget on paying its external debt. Health care and education get 14% and 11%, respectively. So the money that could go to into social programs that might help end the cycle of poverty instead go into debt repayment,

There is plenty of argument about whether global economic programs such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are helpful or harmful to the economies of countries in the two-thirds world. Structural adjustment programs, for example, provide money for needed national projects such as road and dam projects, but they come with conditions such as deregulation of prices and currency, the privatization of state industries and the elimination of trade barriers. Essentially, the country is required to take part in the neoliberal market system that rewards lending institutions and wealthier governments that lend the money, at the expense of the nation’s poor.

Vincent A. Gallagher, in his book The True Cost of Low Prices: The Violence of Globalization, details the downward economic spirals that indebted countries experience under these programs. For example:

The social impact of IMF-sponsored devaluation is usually brutal and immediate. Overnight the prices of food, drugs, fuel, public services and many other products increase sometimes 30 to 50 percent. In poor countries high school students, taxi drivers and people with no formal education come to realize that prices rise after the visits by IMF representatives are reported in the newspapers. Many people in the United States have no idea how the system works. Poor people know all about it because of the way it impacts their lives. The prices of everything go up. …

Increases in the cost of transportation can be devastating. For example workers living in a poor area may take three buses to get to work. With devaluation, transportation costs can go up five cents for each bus fare. So the cost to get to the job and back can go up thirty cents a day or more. If the workers were already living on less than a dollar a day, as over 1 billion people do, the devaluation can push them over the edge. It may now be better for them to go to the local garbage dump to collect paper, bottles, metal and plastic to sell for recycling. They may be able to find food at the dump.

During my brief visit to Nicaragua this summer, the exchange rate was 20 cordobas for each U.S. dollar. The $50 U.S. that I exchanged in Managua lasted the entire eight days, dribbling out of my pocket usually less than a dollar at a time. A souvenir magnet I would have paid $5 for in the U.S. cost me a quarter (which I paid with a U.S. coin; all my cordobas were in 50s and 100s, and the vendor couldn’t make change). And the Coke, the “dirty water of the imperialism”? About 18 cordobas, or a little less than a buck. As was the bottled (and clean, safe-to-drink) water, as was the beer.

So think about this: If you’re making about $2 a day, are you going to be able to fork over nearly 50% of that for a clean drink? Or will you take your chances with the contaminated well that may end up giving you cancer, diarrhea or a host of other health problems?

I’m not an economist; I can barely balance my own checkbook, and when I was in Nicaragua I never could get the hang of the exchange rate. My heart would jump at seeing the menu price for ice cream at 60 cordobas. I had the same experience in Nogales, México, on a BorderLinks experience, trying to plan a dinner for eight on a maquiladora salary and realizing that a gallon of milk would probably deplete most of what I had. Everyone talks about how cheap it is to go to Latin America; our houses are filled with stuff manufactured by factories or food grown in Latin America that we love because they’re so cheap and help us meet our personal budgets with ease. But that’s only because the dollar goes horrifically further than cordoba, the peso, the sole. But if everything you buy is based on the dollar, and all you get is 20 cordobas a day, how will you feed your family? For the first time in my life, I felt too wealthy. I was able to spend my cordobas like water and came home with just a few coins in my pocket because I wanted to make sure it stayed in the country and benefited someone there. But I didn’t feel blessed, I felt like something was terribly wrong with the world, and I was on the wrong side of that divide.

I can’t discount that the development programs by the IMF and World Bank have provided helped Nicaragua by providing some improvement of infrastructure and creation of new markets, new imports and investment. There is much more to this story that I have recounted and attempted to critique here, and I know that I will probably always lack the background to really understand the intricacies of global economics. So I have to fall back on my experience, and I know what I saw. And I can’t see how a system that takes away funds from health care and education and infrastructure, a system that’s geared toward bringing revenue to the investors at the expense of the people in the country being invested in, is one that I can give my blessing.

It’s colonialism in an economic form, imperialism through investment. And I really have to ask myself if I want to be on the side of the empire. It’s reframed my view of Coke and Pepsi and a number of things I take for granted. It’s not necessarily the products, but what they stand for — the hegemony of the neoliberal market and the toll it takes on two-thirds of the world.

It’s Important to Rescue the Frog

I bought into some Web hoaxery this week. Mea culpa, I believed something on YouTube before I checked it out. I really thought Glenn Beck killed a frog on TV:

Truthdig and other news outlets later reported that a slightly longer video clip had circulated through the Web, in which Beck states:

Forget the frog. I swear I thought they jumped right out. But they don’t. Forget about the Republicans, because most of them are fake. Forget about the Democrats, because most of them are fake. And forget about the frog, because it was fake!

And, sure enough, if you watch closely, you can tell that Beck doesn’t actually throw anything into the pot. There’s a little splashy sound, but no frogs were actually harmed in the making of that video.

To tell you the truth, I wasn’t paying attention to what Beck was saying when I first watched the video. When Beck started relating the little axiom about how if you throw a frog into boiling water, it’ll just jump right out, but if you put a frog into cool water and then slowly raise the temperature to boiling, the frog will cook to death, I started thinking that the anecdote couldn’t possibly be true. I really hadn’t thought about that truthy little story before, but as I watched Beck seemingly grab the teeny weeny frog and make his way over to the steaming pot, the thought hamster running on the rodent wheel that is my brain started up and I started thinking “Frog + Boiling Water = FROG MURDER!”

Which was where my brain was when Beck mimicked throwing the frog into the pot. And, as a result, I was horrified by what I believed had happened to the frog.

After reading some analysis about the video — both from various bloggers and my very astute husband, who was not fooled — I took another look at the video and listened this time. And darn if the illusory death of the frog doesn’t perfectly and graphically illustrate the point Beck’s trying to make: That quick changes can kill us much more effectively than slow change.

This is contrary to the usual meaning of this story, which is usually interpreted to mean either that it’s easier to get people to accept change if if comes slowly and gradually, or that complacency kills. An L.A. Times story last year about opposition to same-sex marriage in the U.S. and Star Trek alumnus George Takei’s role as a marriage equality activist illustrates it this way:

Moore and Lux had never heard of West Hollywood. From their startled stares, it appeared they would have preferred never to have heard of it. Only Takei was a familiar face — but the notion that Mr. Sulu was now something of a gay activist just made matters worse.

“You watch this celebration and I honestly worry about indoctrination,” Lux said.

“It’s like the frog-in-the-water syndrome,” Moore added in agreement. “You know, the frog doesn’t realize the water around it is heating up until it’s boiled. I worry that Americans will get used to these images and they’ll throw up their hands and say, ‘Who cares?’ “

It turns out that Beck is more in tune with the reality of the Boiling Frog than most people. According to Snopes.com, frogs do not quietly sit in the increasingly hotter water until they cook to death, but hop out long before the pot reaches the critical temperature. Snopes asked the University of Oklahoma’s own Dr. Victor Hutchison, whose research interests include “the physiological ecology of thermal relations of amphibians and reptiles to include determinations of the factors which influence lethal temperatures, critical thermal maxima and minima, thermal selection, and thermoregulatory behavior.” According to Hutchison:

The legend is entirely incorrect! The ‘critical thermal maxima’ of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.

(More fun with science: Frogs will stay in a pot of boiling water, but only if their brains are removed first. Which, actually, makes the story a little more damning on the group of people who are supposed to represent the frogs.)

So I guess the moral of that story is that Glenn Beck knows more about frog science than Al Gore, who cartoonily depicted the Boiling Frog story in his movie An Inconvenient Truth:

So if the Boiling Frog story isn’t true, why does it continue to dress up our various warnings? Some writers say it’s still a good and useful metaphor, as both Beck and Gore prove; others, like Atlantic blogger Jim Fallows and Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum, say it’s time the frogs retired and got replaced by another phrase that’s both effective and true.

Maybe there’s a way to rehab the Boiling Frog story, maybe something like, “If you throw a frog in a pot of boiling water, you’ll flash-poach it to death; but for heaven’s sake, if you see a frog in a pot of hot water, rescue that sucker!” It lacks panache, sure. But the moral is: The fate of the frog — whether it’s supposed to represent us, others or an actual little Kermit — is up to us.

Is the Boiling Frog story still a useful metaphor? Or is there another, more accurate tale that can make the same point that’s more appropriate for the 21st century?

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