2000 Fall

"Didn't you know how bad things were up there? Don't you even care that the cops were using tear gas, nerve gas, and rubber bullets?" she exclaimed.

"Um, bad?" was the best response I could muster.

The truth of the matter was, I really hadn't paid much attention that 40,000 or more people had converged on a distant city to disrupt a meeting of businessmen who were hell-bent on exploiting the world. I simply didn't care. That's what people do: the Big-Wigs scheme to use others for their own gain, and the youth, influenced by those who claim to be in the know, gather en-masse and get the crap beat out of them.

-- In the last century, we in the US have gone from half of our population involved in agriculture in 1900, to just over two percent of the population involved in agriculture as of 1990. The average farmer is 55 years old.

-- The farmer's share of the food dollar has dropped from 60% of each dollar spent in 1950, to just over two percent by 1998. (For every dollar spent on food, the farmer receives about two cents.)

Hola Friends and Family,

In November and December I traveled to Guatemala and studied Spanish in the Quetzaltenago, which is in highlands, a beautiful area. There were frosts at night, not what I expected when traveling to a tropical country. I spent the New Year there, then returned to the US to attend a week-long training session in Human Rights Accompaniment through the Guatemalan Accompaniment Project, GAP. GAP is a program that was started after the peace accords were signed to end the war in Guatemala and the refugees were returning to Guatemala from several states in southern Mexico. There was concern the military was going to seek retribution for the refugees' escape, so they asked the international community for people to accompany them on their journey back home.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all beings come into existence through the same interdependent processes of Nature; that they are endowed by these processes with inherent and inalienable rights, regardless of their usefulness to other beings; that among these are existence for their own sake, liberty, and the pursuit of Self-realization; that to secure these rights for themselves, governments have been instituted among humon beings to the exclusion of all other beings, deriving their powers from the consent of only one of the species governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these means/ends, it is the right of the nonhumon to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to best guarantee all beings self-determination. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that beings are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of nonhumon beings; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to expunge the present systems of government. The history of the vast majority of present humon societies is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over the rest of the Universe. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

It begins with a story that was related to me recently: Gandhi had organized a very large march, and thousands of people came. After a while he noticed that it had the potential to become violent, so he gathered the people together and told them that he was calling the march off. There was anger; many people had sacrificed a great deal to be there. Gandhi addressed them: " I am human, and I make mistakes. Therefore my commitment must be to truth and not to consistency."