OPINIONS FROM THE BACK 40 - ARCHIVES
 

When the chickens come home to roost and they look like canaries
October 31, 2001

Summary:  Our government was unprepared for anthrax letters because they did not make anthrax threats to women's clinics a priority.

If we are going to insist on talking about "chickens coming home to roost," then let's review this scenario:

The United States has studied biological weapons at least since World War II.  So why wasn't there an existing plan in place to pull from the filing cabinet when the first anthrax letters were dropped off at the United States Postal Service? 

It's not as if the thought of mailing anthrax never occurred to anyone before September 11. People who run family planning clinics for women have been receiving anthrax threats in the mail for 10 years. In one week alone, 170 clinics were threatened. No one has been arrested or prosecuted for these crimes, which, when received by others are called "terrorism" but when clinics receive them, are, what -- just part of the job?

A "value of the victim theory" that diminishes the importance of threats against clinics for women has contributed to a failure to imagine what could be done when anthrax threats became real.  This is another instance where Ellie Smeal's statement that "women are the canaries in the coal mines" applies.

If the government had put a priority on threats to clinics, perhaps someone at a strategy meeting might have logically asked the question,  "what if. . . . ?"

What if actual anthrax was being sent to selected targets through the mail?  What if other biological weapons were actually used in this country?  What would our response be?  Should we change the way the mail is handled?  Should we have vaccination programs in place?  Should we run studies on the safety of vaccines?  And make sure we have them available -- for everyone?  Should we re-implement universal smallpox vaccine programs? Do we have enough antibiotics? 

Then we might have had some real security measures in place for prevention as well as a comprehensive intervention plan to rely on when the threats materialized.  Instead, we're watching our government scramble to the line half-suited up and holding a note someone just wrote on the back of an envelope.  And they've just put out a suggestion box for the public.

Our National Center for Disease Control didn't come through for us.  It hasn't given us anything like the immediate and hard-driving state of readiness demonstrated for us by the fictional disease control centers in our novels and tv movies.  Our Secretary of Health and Human Services doesn't even have the decency to wipe the goofy grin off his face when he reviews the sobering facts -- those for public consumption --  in news conferences, let alone assure us that there is a plan in place. 

We've got at least a two-tiered system of intervention, with members of the House of Representatives getting immediate attention, screening and medication, while the postal workers who handled their mail had to wait until they began demonstrating symptoms.  A postal worker who died had been sent home from the hospital more than once rather than being checked and treated for anthrax while House members were on Cipro.

Our government has demonstrated a total lack of preparedness.  The least it could have done, if it was going to play around with this nasty stuff, was to ask, "what if. . . . .?"  Because the chickens have come home to roost on this one. 

“We have been saying for years that a country where so many people have no rights will create international instability.  People just thought, ‘Oh, there they go about the women again.’ People need to realize that women are important, not just in their own right, but that we’re the canaries in the coal mine. How women are treated is a good indication of which way a society is going.”
- Eleanor Smeal, President of the Feminist Majority Foundation, on the Taliban regime

Women in Afghanistan have not historically been oppressed.  The Koran outlines specific rights for women, which were liberating at the time they were conveyed about 1,400 years ago. The Koran banned infanticide and laid down women's right to education, to choose their husband, divorce, inherit, engage in business and own property.  According to a story in the US News, for the many women forced to flee Afghanistan, the perversion of their faith under the Taliban is the harshest reality. "For God's sake, my grandmother is 78 years old, and she had never put a burka on," said one woman now living in the United States.

Before 1996, women were 70 percent of the school teachers, 40 percent of the doctors, 50 percent of government workers and 50 percent of the college students in Afghanistan.  They were scientists, professors, members of parliament and university professors. 

Since the Taliban became a military and political force, women and girls in Afghanistan have become virtually invisible in Taliban controlled portions of the country. 

Women are forbidden from working outside the home.  Hardest hit have been over 30,000 widows in  Kabul and others elsewhere who are the sole providers for their families. 
Girls are not allowed to attend school
Women and girls are not allowed outside their homes unless covered from head to toe with a burqa.
Access to medical care has been cut.  Women can only be treated by women doctors.
Windows in houses with female occupants must be painted over.
Women have been beaten, stoned and executed for violating rules. 
The average lifespan of a woman in Afghanistan is 45
More women die in childbirth in Afghanistan than anywhere else in the world

In Taliban-controlled areas -- about 95 percent of the country -- there are even rules on the way a woman can walk. She should not walk too energetically lest her feet slap too hard on the ground, making an unseemly noise, or lest she kick up a corner of the garment, showing a glimpse of ankle.  Women have been beaten for "walking too fast."

Some experts estimate that 80 percent of Taliban forces are orphans from the war fought against the Soviets. Raised in religious schools in Pakistan known as madrasahs, they grow up with no normal contact with women, including mothers and sisters. 

Women and girls who have been existing under these oppressive conditions should not also become victims of any military action taken by the United States to redress the terrible injustice done to the victims of terrorism on September 11, 2001.

Humanitarian Aid
The United States is taking the correct steps by sending humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and refugees who have fled the country.  Winter is coming and conditions in camps will be harsh. There will be a desperate need for food and medicine.   Recipients of humanitarian aid should include some of the small women's nonprofit organizations that have been trying for years to get the rest of the world to understand the conditions for women and children, and providing schooling and medical care for Afghan women and girls. 

Activists around the country can help by contacting their senators as soon as possible to express support for an increased amount of humaitarian aid, as well as to demand that any aid package include assistance to smaller, direct-service NGO's as well as larger organizations.

Take Action

Please call the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected with your senator's office.  Urge your senators to 

1.  Expand humanitarian aid for the people of Afghanistan. 

2.  Ensure that some of this aid reaches the smaller indigenous nonprofit organizations, especially the women-run groups, that will continue their assistance long after our aid dollars are gone.

3.  Or go to www.now.org/congress to send an instant email to your senators.

More Help for Afghan Women

More information

Feminist Majority Foundation
RAWA - Revolutionary Association of Women in Afghanistan
US State Department Fact Sheet
WLUM -  Women Living Under Muslim Laws International Solidarity Network
Mujeres en Red
Behind the Burqa
The Taliban's Bravest Opponents
Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women

Women's/ Women's Organization Statements

Women's petitions and statements, vigils and marches are some of the actions already undertaken or being planned.  This web-site set up by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (UN Office) contains many of the petitions and statements. 
http://www.peacewomen.org

COMMENTARY
Falwell Should Have Listened to the Feminists
By ROBERT SCHEER
Los Angeles Times

Ever hear of the Feminist Majority? Just the sort of people Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson held responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attack because they "make God mad." Well, it's the Feminist Majority, more than any other organization in the U.S., that sounded the alarm that the Taliban's suppression of freedom, led by its harsh treatment of women, posed "a threat to humanity" that extended beyond the borders of Afghanistan and that "the Taliban and [Osama] bin Laden are interdependent and inextricable."

If Falwell and Robertson had listened to the feminists instead of attacking them, the two men might have recognized the frightening parallels between their brand of religious extremism and that spewed by the Taliban. Instead, they fanned the flames of hate. As Falwell put it before public outrage forced him to recant: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America--I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen."' Robertson heartily agreed. Although the Taliban are actually milder in their condemnation of abortion than these two, they doubtless would applaud Robertson for saying that the terrorists' success is owed to God's wrath over our courts permitting "35 [million] to 40 million unborn babies to be slaughtered." In the homophobia department, the Taliban agrees that gays are to be condemned, having buried five men alive under a crushing pile of stones for the "crime" of being homosexual, according to Amnesty International. And the Taliban undoubtedly shares Falwell's hatred of civil liberties groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way for their opposition to state-imposed religion.

On the latter point, in a prison interview, Mahmud Abouhalima, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, stated that his war isn't against Christians but U.S. "secularists" who are exporting their way of life to the Muslim world. As Abouhalima told UC Santa Barbara Professor Mark Juerensmeyer, living in America allowed him "to understand what the hell is going on in the United States and in Europe about secularism of people, you know, who have no religion." He said the U.S. would be better off with a Christian government because "at least it would have morals."

That view of the secular enemy, San Francisco Chronicle religion writer Don Lattin pointed out, is uncomfortably close to our own religious extremists' views and "remind[s] us that no religion has a monopoly on twisting spiritual truth." He said that there's a far distance between condemning secularists, as Falwell and Robertson did, and killing them, but noted the deep contempt that the two American religious leaders have in common with the Taliban toward those who might view religion in a different way.

For Robertson, the prime enemy is our court system, which has upheld the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state: "We have a court that has essentially stuck its finger in God's eye." The terrorists succeeded, Robertson said, because, "We have insulted God at the highest levels of our government. ... God Almighty is lifting his protection from us."

Forget building up the military. Ban the ACLU instead!

We owe Falwell and Robertson a debt for sealing the argument for the separation of church and state, given the specter of a state-empowered church run by men like them. 

Do animals have the "right" not to be utilized for food production?

Farmers and ranchers raising cows for milk and beef are intimately involved in the lives of the animals they raise.  They care for them daily from the first bloody moment of birth and do so outdoors in every kind of weather, in the heat and the wind and in the worst kind of blizzard in order to make sure they are well, watered and fed.

Anyone who has risked getting lost in a pasture in the middle of a white-out to freeze her gloves to her fingers while chipping the ice from the top of the water tank, or who does maternity watch night after weary night, or delivers a calf in the sleet and rain and then lifts the heavy newborn, wet, slick and bloody, against her jacket to carry the baby to a warm and dry place, or who rides a wide range for hours, looking for a lost cow, or who gets up out of bed at two in the morning to go out into a storm to find animals that were scared by lightning and broke down a fence, and who then stands in the lightning storm and fixes the fence, or who gets down on her belly in a pool of icy water to fix a pipe that has broken so the cows will have water, (and so on and so on) does not take lightly her responsibility to the animals.

From things that I have read on some animal rights web sites, it seems far too easy for activists to sit comfortably indoors in town and theorize about what is best for animals while those they criticize as being without compassion and unconcerned with the suffering of animals do the actual hard work of the endless daily care of the animals in question.

Come out of your house and out of your town and stand by the treatment rail, and take a look at this cow.  She wasn't acting like herself this morning when I walked the pens.  I know that because I walk the pens each day.  Take her temperature.  Look into her eyes to see what they tell you.  Smell her breath.  Look at the color of her nose and mouth.  Pinch her skin along her back bone and watch the response.  Touch her brisket.  Take my stethoscope, pat her on her side to reassure her and then listen to her heart, her rumen noises, listen for the ping of a displaced abomasum to know if she needs surgery.  Put on a glove and palpate her, check the texture of her manure, the smell of it, and tell me if she is sick or well.  Give her a pill, carry two 5-gallon buckets of water to her.  Put an IV needle in her vein.  Get some manure on your shoes.  Do this daily and then tell me that you care more about this cow than the person who has been caring for her daily for years.

You are concerned about the "rights" of this cow -- her "right" not to be milked.  This cow is a domesticated animal that relies on humans for her welfare.  I am busy being responsible for her welfare while you are occupied with theorizing.

Even from a purely economic standpoint, it would not make sense to mistreat or be unconcerned for the health and well being of an animal.

What is the end result of an agenda that would successfully stop people from drinking milk and eating beef?   It wouldn't be dairy and beef cattle contentedly grazing on native pasture grass.  It would be a world without cows, and without people living lives interacting with cows, because no one would raise them.  Should we tell people who care for cows that they should quit doing this work and "liberate" these animals to their extinction?