A Surprising Mother's Day Gift

From Recently Updated

I've received my share of memorable Mother's Day gifts over the years, despite occasional snarky comments about the “Hallmark Card” nature of the holiday. Casts of my children's handprints, hand-made pillows and vases, and the “Mom's Day Off” button that wasn't as effective as it promised, have all brought a smile to my face.

But this year I received an unusual gift, and it came, rather surprisingly, from my husband.

“How would you like to go for a bike ride?” he asked me as I drank my morning coffee. I thought about it and looked outside to see one of those perfect Northern California spring days --sunny but mild.

“Okay,” I agreed. Where shall we go?” He coaxed me to try some hills, telling me that after months of working out at the gym's “virtual reality” bikes, I was in better shape than I imagined.

Feeling both challenged and a bit nervous, I set out with him towards the Santa Cruz Mountains. As we hit the first slopes on the bike path, my husband told me to downshift. Breathing fast I did so and we made it to the end of the path at the underpass of I-280.

Here we turned left and started up the real hills following a series of side streets that eventually would take us to Page Mill Road, the route serious bikers take up to Skyline Ridge or even over the mountains to the Pacific. Now I was on my lowest gear and just focusing on my mantra: “One more foot of asphalt, Just one more foot. Keep pedaling. Keep breathing.”

To give you a sense of why I was so much on my mettle during this ride I have to explain about my long-running love/hate relationship with the bicycle. To me the bicycle represents a perfect balance of yin and yang: the thrill of speed and the peril of losing life and limb.

There are home movies of my Dad returning from his daily bike ride to pick up a newspaper with me tucked on one arm, while he used his other arm to steer.

When I was a little bigger I used to ride on the back of the bike on a seat my father made out of an arm rest. I often rode without shoes until the day I caught my heel in the spokes of the back wheel and gained a scar I carry to this day, and after that, Dad threatened me with a switch if he caught me out biking barefoot.

From My Pictures

At three I rode my tricycle so fast around curves that I frequently tipped over, scraping knees and elbows. At five, free of training wheels, I rode my bike around a bend in the sidewalk, hit a piece of concrete that had been lifted by tree roots and chipped my brand-new front permanent tooth on the handlebars.

By the time I was in my teens, I was riding far afield, still seeking the thrill of speed. There weren't many hills around my house, but I did find one with a decent incline. Unfortunately, the city buses used to run along the road at the bottom, and my brakes were not reliable so there inevitably came that “Oh my God” moment when I sailed in front of a bus driver with inches to spare.

But my real fear on this particular Mother's Day came from the memory of having attempted this same ride years ago on a ten-speed. Then I had downshifted to the lowest gear only to find that I was basically pedaling in place. I finally had to get off and push the bike up the steepest part as other bikers flew past, and the humiliation was too much. I was twenty-something and already too old for biking.

Now, sweating and making my painstaking way up another steep slope I thought that while nearly twenty more years had passed, I was actually making it this time.

We finally reached our intersection with Page Mill Road, and my husband was still urging me onwards. “It's only another half mile to Foothill Park,” he told me. “We're almost to Foothill Park?” I thought to myself incredulously. Now I had to keep going and I did, feeling a huge and surprising sense of accomplishment. I'd not only conquered a hill; I'd conquered about four miles of hill.

The best part, however, was yet to come. “Do you want to go back down Page Mill?” my husband asked me. I readily agreed and shifted to third so I could stay in better control of my speed. I turned my bike around and set off, transported back to my childhood self, the speed demon, heedless of possible scrapes and bruises, with the wind rushing past me and the cars barely passing me, and many glorious miles of descent unimpeded by red lights, stop signs, or city buses.

It's not often you find yourself physically upstaging your twenty-something former self, and I can attest, it feels like you've had a taste of immortality when it happens. So here's to more bike rides and a Mother's Day gift that didn't make me feel like a mom at all but just like being a kid again.

Has the Marriage Debate Reached a Tipping Point?

Photo courtesy of Sarah Parker. All rights reserved.

For the past few years Americans have been consumed with discussions about the legalization of same-sex marriage, first as a political wedge issue, but more recently as a legal phenomenon that seems to be gaining momentum.

Americans were simultaneously incredulous, elated, transfixed and horrified when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome began his impromptu issuing of marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples in February 2004, a mere three months before Massachusetts became the first state in the union to legalize same-sex marriage. Before that only Vermont allowed couples of the same sex to gain any kind of legal recognition and then only under the rubric of “civil unions,” a term purposely created to avoid the religious and cultural sensitivities that surround the word “marriage.”

It's ironic in a way that marriage has become such a social and political bone of contention when the general movement of heterosexual couples over the past thirty to forty years has been away from marriage as both a legal and religious symbol. Beginning with rising rates of divorce in the 1960's and 70's, the number of couples dissolving their marriages reached a peak in 1981 (5.3 for every 1,000 people) before beginning a modest decline.

At the same time, increasing numbers of couples, particularly among the young, began to choose to co-habit or “live together” rather than marry, so much so that the 2000 census had to replace its quaint acronym, POSSLQ (Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters) with the more accurate “unmarried partner,” which could cover both same-sex and different-sex couples. In 2005, the United States Census Bureau reported 4.85 million cohabiting couples, up more than 1,000 percent from 1960, when there were only 439,000 such couples.

So it seems a bit strange that heterosexual couples, who seem less inclined to marry or to stay married themselves, should get so exorcised over the desire of same-sex couples to participate in a type of legal union heterosexual couples increasingly reject. Indeed, there is a certain “dog in the manger” quality to heterosexual arguments against same-sex marriage.

At best, these arguments offer same-sex couples the alternative of “civil union” as a kind of “separate but equal” institution for marriage, even though these same legally married couples bridle at the thought of making all “marriages” into “civil unions” for legal and governmental purposes. They want to stay “married” not “CUed” (civilly-unioned).

At worst, these arguments use a kind of “marriage in wonderland” logic to allege that same-sex marriages will somehow harm the marriages of heterosexual couples.

And that's the Achilles' heel of the argument against same-sex marriage.

We've been living with same-sex marriage in the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, South Africa, and Sweden as well as a host of other countries who offer civil unions that carry the full rights and responsibilities as those provided by marriage. Yet Western civilization as we know it has not come to an end, there has been no mass expression of moral outrage, no uptick in the number of children declaring themselves “gay” because their parents are “gay,” no discernible effects on families whatsoever, except for gay couples and their children, who finally can exercise the legal rights other families take for granted.

You know that the hysteria over gay marriage has reached its last gasps when the “threatening” scenario of an advertisement like “The Gathering Storm” provokes more laughter and parody than nods of agreement. Opposition to gay marriage has long seemed like a powerful political stance for conservatives; now politicians who express strong disapproval of gay marriage risk seeming merely silly and out of touch.

In demographic terms, I represent a divide between members of an older generation that finds it hard to accept the idea of same-sex marriage and younger people who increasingly take it for granted that some of their peers will want to marry someone of the same sex. According to a recent ABC/Washington Post poll: “Support for gay marriage has grown somewhat among voters over age 65, from 15 percent to 28 percent, but six in ten remain strongly opposed. Among those under 35, though, two-thirds support it, up from 53 percent in 2006, and nearly half support it strongly."

For those who fear the rising tide of public support for same-sex marriage as well as the expanding enfranchisement of same-sex couples to marry in more states, time is not on their side. Same-sex marriage will gain more acceptance, and although I'm not often given to prediction, I believe that by the time more than half of states legalize such marriages, the response of the public will be a collective yawn.

Now it's spring, the wedding season is upon us, and I myself will soon be attending the nuptials of my niece who is marrying a man. Frankly, it would make no difference to me if she were marrying another woman. Having attended at least one same-sex marriage, commitment ceremony, what you will, I can safely say that the beauty of a marriage celebration comes from sharing in the happiness of the couple who are pledging their faith in front of friends and families and not whether that couple is gay or straight. Some day I hope it won't even be an issue.

Nothing Says Summer Like a Day at the Beach, Any Time of Year

We had a brief heat wave a couple of weekends ago when Bay Area cities broke records, and then we descended back into wintry weather with cloudy skies, wind gusts, and temperatures that barely broke into the 60's and 70's. Even I agreed to turn on the heat the other day when the rest of the family got out of bed and started putting on parkas and two layers of sweatshirts over their pajamas.

We're in the middle of spring, and in Palo Alto, that means we should at least be getting a taste of summer. True the roses are in bloom, and the pollen count is up, but it's often been too cold to be outside without a jacket and we've had more clouds and rain than I can remember for this time of year. For a region that's been plagued by drought, this is good news, but there's a part of me that's still insists stubbornly that this is not exactly the merry month of May.

So I'm looking back with nostalgia at photos from a weekend we spent at the beach in the middle of April when we had a brief respite from rain and clouds. We had one perfect day on the coast in Carmel: the sun was out, the sky was a brilliant blue, and the kids felt warm enough to risk getting splashed by cold Pacific waves.

We started out by climbing along the rocks and tidal pools at the Point Lobos State Park Reserve. My youngest soon left me behind as he scrambled up sharp inclines like a mountain goat, reminding me of my own father's penchant for climbing rocks, and getting himself into perches overlooking waterfalls or ravines that were clearly out of bounds. “Dad, the ranger's coming,” I found myself yelling at him once when were in Yosemite, hoping it would scare him back down into safer territory.

There was no hope of that today. I hadn't seen a single park official anywhere, but one of the mothers who was with us, filled in that role, telling her kids not to follow mine out onto the rocks where a rogue wave could sweep them off. She was perfectly right to be concerned since her two boys were much younger than mine. My fifteen-year-old was keeping an eye on his adventuresome younger brother, and my husband was also looking out for them, when he wasn't concentrating on getting a perfect shot of the waves and the pelicans that kept sweeping across just above them in swift-moving arcs. I had sighted a playful sea otter with my binoculars and had no intention of going anywhere as long as it stayed in view.

Now that I'm on my third son and resigned to the fact that he's an intrepid climber, my attitude towards child safety has shifted considerably towards: “Don't ask, don't look.” I know the odds are that they will make it out of childhood with no more than scrapes and bruises (and so far one broken arm), and following them around telling them to be careful is just going to drive them towards steeper cliffs and more dangerous surf. As it turned out, my boys did move off the furthest rock about one minute before a wave swept over it, but my husband reassured me that they would just have been soaked (most likely).

From Springs to Mind

In search of safer beaches, we climbed up the trail towards China Beach, a protected cove with white sand that shines under turquoise waters as if you had suddenly found yourself in Jamaica, only with much, much colder water. There was no chance of playing in these waters, however, because the beach had been taken over by mother harbor seals who were still nursing their pups. We watched one pair emerge onto the beach and lumber up onto the sand, and then with the binoculars we began to discern at least four or five more pairs, and one pup who was old enough to be on her own. The young ones flopped and wriggled while their mothers occasionally batted them with a flipper as if to say, “Enough already. Can't you see I'm trying to take a nap?”

Tomas, my fifteen-year-old, was still determined to make it to beach where there were waves he could play in so we all piled back into our respective mini-vans and headed about a quarter mile north on Highway 1 to Monastery Beach, officially known as the Carmel River State Beach, and referred to by local divers as “Mortuary” Beach because just about every year there are fatalities due to rip tides, rogue waves, or divers who lose track of their depth.

The geology of beach is fascinating because as you look at the cliffs behind where the Carmelite monastery is located, you don't realize that you're on the edge of an enormous canyon, big enough to hold several Grand Canyons. The steep slope of the beach means that waves often crash directly onto the sand, particularly in the middle where the slope is steepest.

That didn't stop Tomas from playing in the freezing surf, keeping a watchful eye on the younger ones who ran up to the waves and then away from them cackling with glee. All of them got soaked eventually, but the cold and wet couldn't dampen the joy on their faces. With Tomas guarding them from behind and the rest of the adults watching them from above, we whiled away a perfect warm sunny afternoon as the tide came in and children ran shrieking from advancing waves, stopping only to refuel on cookies and grapes before they ran back for more and more.

From Springs to Mind

The Hundred Day Mark

I can't help but participate in the media frenzy over Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. After all this is the first time in over 10 years that the candidate I voted for actually won the presidency, so I feel a special responsibility for his success or failure.

Looking back it's hard to image the very real fears some Americans felt about electing the first African-American president. In a series that NPR ran on voters in York, Pennsylvania, during the fall campaign, you could sense how uncomfortable some whites felt about him. As one woman put it, “"I don't want to sound racist, and I'm not racist. But I feel if we put Obama in the White House, there will be chaos. I feel a lot of black people are going to feel it's payback time,” ("York Voters Express Post-Election Hopes, Fears," NPR, October 24, 2008). Some white voters like this woman, sincerely thought there would be a racial backlash against whites as a result of this election, if not by Obama, than by voters of color who supported him.

Or course, this seems absurd now. President Obama acts neither like a black president, nor a white president; instead, he has presented himself above all as an American president, and projected an idea of America both here and abroad that is strongly welcoming of those who have felt left out of the political process: the middle class, recent immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, even atheists. Overseas, repressive governments may well feel that the greatest danger posed by Obama is not a resurgence of American imperialism but simply the outpouring of admiration and support among the young, particularly in the Middle East where most of the population is under the age of 30.

Here at home, the Republican Party watches in dismay as Obama woos voters away from their bases of support in the Midwest, West, and even the South. Demographics, both generationally and in growing minority populations, favor Obama's style of politics.

It is true that President Obama has had his own stumbles, particularly with candidates for cabinet and agency positions who turn out to be as beholden to special interests as Republicans nominees before them. For a while, it seemed that just about every nominee had a “tax problem” of some dimension, a few minor, a few serious enough to make it necessary for such candidates to take themselves out of consideration.

It is also true that President Obama finds himself constrained by the nation's overwhelming financial problems from addressing the many ethical questions left behind by the Bush Administration, including its perversion of the Constitution to justify torture, abrogate the right to habeas corpus, and spy on its own citizens in the name of fighting terrorism.

As a pragmatist, Obama has already made it clear he wants to delegate these constitutional and moral issues to the Justice Department so that he can cut the necessary deals with Republicans in both houses to make headway on his ambitious domestic agenda: expanding health care, pushing “green” industries, addressing climate change, and jump starting the economy, not to mention juggling two wars overseas and an ever-evolving series of foreign policy crises in North Korea, Pakistan, Iran, and the Middle East.

While it's too early to give Obama a “grade” for how he has performed domestically and internationally, he certainly deserves high praise for the work ethic he has demonstrated since he took office. No one is likely to compare his days spent on vacation with those of his predecessors, Reagan and Bush. His energy, ambition, and drive are literally breath-taking, yet so far, he exudes a cool-headness about his agenda rather than a sense of hubris.

But Obama's greatest accomplishment so far has been the change he has helped to effect in public confidence. Americans of all political persuasions give him high marks for character and personal integrity, something many thought had all but disappeared on the political stage. More importantly, an increasing number of Americans now believe that the country is on the right track. This month saw a surprisingly sharp uptick in consumer confidence,(1) which is a good indicator that Americans may start spending a little more freely, a necessity if economic activity is to expand again.

Anyone looking at the achievements of the President's first hundred days should also give credit to his wife, Michelle, for the tone she has helped set at home and abroad. Her warmth contrasts with his relative aloofness, and her down-to-earth intelligence combined with great personal charm has given rise to unexpected moments of connection, like the hug she shared with Queen Elizabeth that so shocked veterans of Buckingham Palace.

Obama's own memoir, The Audacity of Hope, seems like an appropriate label for his first hundred days. He has shown considerable audacity in what he has taken on, and he has given Americans hope that he can actually pull it off. That alone gets his Presidency off to a strong start.

(1) "The New York-based Conference Board said Tuesday that its Consumer Confidence Index rose more than 12 points to 39.2, up from a revised 26.9 in March. The reading marks the highest level since November's 44.7 and well surpasses economists' expectations for 29.5," AP, April 29, 2009.

Talk about a “Stale Debate” - Why we Need to Stop Arguing about the “Ticking Bomb” Scenario

One thing is clear in the aftermath of President Obama's release of the so-called “torture” memos: those who wrote these memos and their apologists want to frame the debate as one in which torture saved the world from terrorism. Vice-President Cheney has called for the release of the information gathered by practicing these techniques, alleging that this will prove that the ends justified the means.

Of course, one cannot prove that a terrorist event that didn't take place was definitively related to the gathering of such information or that such information could not have been garnered by other means. We're still left with a putative connection between evidence and and something that might have happened as a result, and those connecting the dots have a vested interest in turning that connection into a narrative of the world saved by a last minute necessity, however brutal or indefensible in any other circumstances.

Behind all of these justifications for resorting to torture lies the specter of the “ticking bomb.” In this hypothetical and highly unlikely scenario, a terrorist who is directly responsible for the setting of a ticking bomb refuses to tell authorities where the bomb is. At that point, some argue that torture is justified to get this information and save the lives of those in harm's way. Those who make this argument as a defense of the Bush Administration's torture policies may believe this to be true or they may simply want to sway public opinion in their favor before they end up as defendants themselves.

Unfortunately, many Americans tend to buy the “ticking bomb” scenario because it's the plot behind just about every Hollywood action flick in which the seconds tick off and the bomb is stopped just in time, usually through the violent intervention of the hero. The popular TV series 24 relies explicitly on the appeal of the “ticking bomb” plot. The world is saved and the hero's vigilante actions demonstrate that in the world of terrorism the ends justify the means.

But real life is not at all like a Hollywood action flick as police officers can tell you when they have to sort out real bomb threats from pranksters or attention seekers. And the perpetrators of terrorist acts like the mentally handicapped woman who was induced to become a suicide bomber in Iraq can also be victims of terrorist plotters just like those who died as a result of her suicide bombing.

In addition, mistaken identity can lead to terrible consequences as a German citizen, Khaled al-Masri, can attest after he was apprehended by US authorities who thought he was a terrorist. US authorities then used the principle of extraordinary rendition to send him directly from Kennedy Airport to be tortured and jailed in a Syrian prison until Condoleeza Rice intervened to order his release.

But the main problem with debating the “ticking bomb” scenario is that it is all about debating unprovable outcomes. We can't prove that authorities will never face the perfect ticking bomb situation, and those who believe that torture is never justifiable under any circumstances can never prove that alternate methods would result in extracting the same information that torture could produce. (For an excellent analysis of this scenario, see Gary Kamiya's article in Salon).

However, we can take as a given that under the ticking bomb scenario, someone will act to stop a terrorist. We witnessed this in the closest thing to a real ticking bomb scenario the U.S. has experienced, namely, when the passengers on Flight 93 realized that the airplane they were flying on was intended as a suicide bomb. The initiative they took to stop that bomb at the expense of their own lives demonstrates that both courage and common sense can prevail in such extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. Nor would we blame the military if they had been forced to shoot down that plane before it could crash into the White House or other buildings in Washington D.C.

Yet what we should be debating far more seriously than these extraordinary circumstances are the effects of policies that give legal authority to use methods explicitly outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, whether you call them “enhanced” interrogation techniques or torture.

How do we protect our own soldiers from being tortured when we use such methods against others? Do we really think that our enemies are going to distinguish between a soldier and a military combatant or even a civilian who ends up in the wrong place at the wrong time?

What will we do with the prisoners at Guantanamo who were tortured? If they are dangerous, we should be reluctant to release them, but under what pretext can we continue to detain them when our legal system requires that they be charged and tried even at this late date? Yet how can we try these prisoners when the evidence against them has been extracted by torture and will not be admissible in any serious court of law? We know that those who are tortured will say anything to stop the pain; therefore, we can never fully rely on the validity of what such prisoners say under duress. Indeed, after such treatment, it is unclear whether those who were tortured are even mentally fit to stand trial.

In fact, the information gathered by torturing Al Quaeda leaders like Abu Zubaydah often blurred the distinction between real threats and imaginary alarms as much of the information he gave led to unnecessary and expensive surveillance of American landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and even large malls when no real threat existed. Ask any American if s/he is really worried about our being at “orange” alert level, and you realize how dangerous the dissemination of bad information can be in lulling Americans into a false sense of security, and no one yet knows or has acknowledged how much useless information was tortured out of individuals along with information that had some value.

But the real problem with the torture memos is that the United States traded a potential short-term gain for vastly more negative long term consequences. If the real goal of our government is to stop terrorism, we have instead prolonged and strengthened the impetus towards terrorism by our actions. Every act of torture recorded by the Red Cross, every photo of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, every case of mistaken identity that ended with in the abuse of an innocent person has served as a recruiting poster for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

Yes, we have not experienced an act of terrorism on U.S. soil, but in the interim the incidence of terrorism around the world has risen significantly since 9/11, even as respect for and cooperation with the U.S. government has plummeted.

Worse, by giving up on our Constitutional principles and respect for the rule of law, the United States has abandoned the ethical in high ground that gave hope to millions around the world who look to the U.S. as a defender of laws and of human rights. That makes it much much harder for the United States to condemn the actions of a Russia or a China against its own citizens when those actions can so easily be coded as acts to prevent “terrorism” whether in Chechnya or Tibet.

The Obama Administration has taken an important step in rectifying the United States's past mistakes by making the torture memos public. But this is only the first step, and much more remains to be disclosed before we can close the door on this sordid chapter of our history.

What we should do now is stop debating whether or not torture is ever necessary and start recognizing the ways our practice of torture has already damaged our national security and our relations with the rest of the world.

We remain a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, but it will be a long time before the rest of the world trusts us to uphold them. We need to start building that trust now by repudiating torture in the strongest and most unequivocal terms.

The Obama Administration is trying to steer a middle course between letting bygones be bygones and taking on a full-scale prosecution of those who committed torture by bringing past practices to light but not taking legal action against the perpetrators. That is understandable given the President's inherent pragmatism and the enormous challenges he faces domestically that will require the cooperation of Republicans in Congress.

But that does not mean that the Justice Department and Congress itself need follow this course. For example, Congress has the ability and the right to impeach Judge Jay Bybee who signed two of these memos. Senator Carl Levin has stated: "I really think it's important that the Justice Department make the decision as to who, if anybody, is prosecuted here,” adding that it is his personal opinion “that the legal opinions here were abominations,” ("Congress: Who's Accountable for Torture Memos?" Morning Edition, April 23, 2009).

If the United States wants to demonstrate to the rest of the world that we truly are a nation of laws, we should let our own rule of law take its course and bring those responsible for these memos to justice, according them the basic human rights they so easily denied to those who were brutally treated as a result of their perverse interpretation of our Constitution and our common understanding of what constitutes “torture."

Who Says You Can't Grow a Garden without “Crop Protection Products”?

Organic gardening on the White House lawn? Plants grown without artificial fertilizer and insecticides? Children learning that food comes from the soil and not from the supermarket?

The Mid America CropLife Association just won't stand for it any longer. Appalled by the revolution sprouting where manicured, fertilized, and properly “crop protected” lawn used to sit, this agricultural trade association has decided to educate Michelle Obama and her young associates about the proper role of a garden.

Not only did Executive Director and Program Director of MACA send a letter to Mrs. Obama, they also forwarded it to their associates with the warning:

While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder. As a result, we sent a letter encouraging them to consider using crop protection products and to recognize the importance of agriculture to the entire U.S. economy.

Of course! Plant one organic garden outside the White House, and then everybody will have a garden in their backyard, and sooner than you can say “organically grown,” the fragile edifice that is American agribusiness will come crumbling down in a torrent of corn husks.

The letter goes on to extol the virtues of American agriculture, claiming that “many people, especially children, don't realize the extent to which their daily lives depend on America's agricultural industry.” Okay, and having kids create a garden won't enlighten them about where their food comes from?

No, starting a garden is not worth the effort the letter-writers warn. “The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family's year-round food needs.”

Furthermore, the writers claim that “much of the food considered not wholesome or tasty is the result of how it is stored or prepared rather than how it is grown. Fresh foods grown conventionally are wholesome and flavorful yet more economical” than food grown using “organic” methods, a word these writers don't even want to mention.

These CropLife Ambassadors then generously offer to “educate” Mrs. Obama and her young gardeners. "The CropLife Ambassador Network offers educational programs for elementary school educators at http://ambassador.maca.org covering the science behind crop protection products and their contribution to sustainable agriculture. You may find our programs America's Abundance, Farmers Stewards of the Land and War of the Weeds of particular interest."

This kind of propaganda would be merely amusing (I really, really want to see the War of the Weeds), but it does show just how scared big agribusiness is of Americans caring about and wanting to learn about how their food is grown and what effect our conventional methods of agriculture are having on the environment, on fuel consumption, and on our national security (as the price of food rises around the world so does political instability).

While the CropLife Ambassador Networks wants Americans to imagine a bucolic world of abundance, where an acre of land yields “42,000 lbs. of strawberries, 110,000 heads of lettuce, 25,400 lbs. of potatoes, 8,900 lbs. of sweet corn, or 640 lbs of cotton lint,” the real focus of agribusiness is directed towards the production of corn, meat and dairy products, and soybeans.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations reported that as of 2003 the top five U.S. agricultural “products” were: 1. Corn 256,904,992 2. Cattle meat 11,736,300 3. Cow's milk, whole, fresh 78,155,000 4. Chicken meat 15,006,000 5. Soybeans 65,795,300 (all in metric tonnes).

Add to that the fact that more than 50% of the corn grown in the U.S. is fed to animals and that an increasing percentage is going towards ethanol production, and you can see that providing your local family with lettuce, strawberries, and sweet corn ranks way down the list of agribusiness priorities. Throw in the additional fact that more than 50% of antibiotics used in the U.S. go to animals raised for food, and you can see that “crop-protection” products may well protect “crops” (plant and animal) at the expense of those who consume them (Mark Bittman, Food Matters, p. 23).

To add insult to injury, the Mid America CropLife Association is affiliated with CropLife America, a marketing association funded by the Department of Agriculture, that is, taxpayers like you and me. A list of the member organizations of Mid America CropLife reads like a who's who of the chemical industry, including, but not limited to: Aceto Agricultural Chemicals Corporation, Cheminova Inc., Dow Agrosciences, Kova Fertilizer, Monsanto, and United Phosphorus, Inc.

No wonder they shudder at the thought of the White House putting its imprimatur on an organic garden and teaching kids that they can grow food without pesticides.

After all, that's how we got people to stop smoking: by showing them just what kind of chemicals they were ingesting with every puff and educating the young, who in turn, educated their parents.

So even if you laugh at the Mid American CropLife Association's overreaction to Mrs. Obama's organic garden, don't fail to take them seriously. And while you're at it, send Mrs. Obama and her gardeners a letter of thanks for making a garden grow in a way that benefits the earth and all of us.

An Immigrant Story: Retracing my Family's Journey to America

Photo of Steinbach-Hallenberg by Stefan Nothnagel (24.12.2006)

From Beth Wahl Family Small

Photo of my Paternal Grandfather Adolph Wahl (January 7, 1886-November 30, 1930)

A few years before he died in 1978 my father sat down and typed up all he could remember of his family history. This is how his story begins:

In west central Germany in the general vicinity of Erfurt is a small town named Steinbach-Hallenberg which is approximately twenty miles south of Eisenach, Thüringer. So far as is known its only industry was a nail factory, which provided the principal income for the townspeople. Near the end of the nineteenth century, all that I know of my father's family left there and emigrated to America. The family consisted of my grandmother Mary Wahl and her three sons Adolph, August, and David. My father was about seven years old when they landed at Ellis Island and settle din the metropolitan New York-New Jersey area. My uncle August became a toolmaker, Adolph and electroplater, and David a house painter...David was the eldest and lived his whole life in Newark, New Jersey. My father, Adolph, was very energetic and ambitious. I recall he rode a motorcycle from Newark to Rochester, New York in 1910. August never married and lived most of his life in New York City until he passed away in 1960.

My father's autobiography begins, not with his own birth, but with the exodus of his ancestors from their homeland, constructing a narrative that echoes the structure of a fairy tale: a widowed mother with three boys, leaving their small town to seek their fortunate in a strange new land.

I was fifteen when my father died, and I hadn't yet developed a curiosity about my family origins. If anything, I was relatively prejudiced against all things German, which I associated with older relatives pontificating about the past and too much wurst, potatoes, and long drawn-out family gatherings.

But this summer I will finally make my father's father's journey in reverse, traveling from America to Germany, and for the first time in two generations, I will meet some of the Wahls who did stay behind in Steinbach-Hallenberg.

Now I want to ask him so many questions: Who told you the family came from Steinbach-Hallenberg? Did the nail factory shut down? What made your paternal grandmother decide to leave and what happened to her in America? Why did August never marry, and why did your father leave the family in Newark to make a new life for himself in the upstate town of Rochester so far away and so different from Newark or Manhattan?

In the meantime, I am trying my best to piece together some of the history that lies behind those all too brief sentences my father typed out for his children in the basement of our house in Detroit.

Some of the things I've found out have been surprising. Searching the Ellis Island archives, I discovered that David Wahl traveled three years before his mother and younger brothers on the ship Lahn arriving on June 8th, 1893 when he was only 16 years old. Marie Wahl arrived July 2, 1896 on the same ship with August and Wilhelm Adoph, my paternal grandfather. I've also discovered that Marie Wahl's maiden name was Bauerschmidt and that her husband, Peter Wilhelm Wahl died in 1893, a scant six months after his eldest son, David, arrived in the United States.

Travelling to Ellis Island two summers ago, I had a chance to see just a little bit of what my grandfather and his brothers might have experienced in 1896 when they arrived on the Lahn. If they had first or second-class tickets, the immigration experience would have been not much more burdensome than what we experience today in customs: a cursory inspection aboard ship.

However, if they were third class or “steerage” passengers they would have traveled in crowded, and not very sanitary conditions near the bottom of their steamship, spending perhaps two weeks in their bunks before they finally could breathe fresh air. Upon arrival in New York City, the ships would dock at the Hudson or East River piers and allow the first and second class passengers to disembark first. The other passengers were taken from the pier by ferry or barge to Ellis Island where everyone had to undergo a medical and legal inspection before being released. Most likely David had encountered a friend or family member to meet him at Ellis Island, but I cannot know this for sure.

All I can say is that standing on Ellis Island on a humid morning in July with the air so thick and cloudy it felt that you could cut it with a knife, I imagine that it would have been both thrilling to see the Statue of Liberty so close at hand and a little frightening as well to realize that only a narrow channel of water separated you from unforeseen adventures in Manhattan or on the Jersey shore.

Still as I reread my father's words, so many questions run through my mind: Why did David go ahead of the others? Did Marie and her children wait to follow David because their father was ill? Was the original plan for all of them to emigrate together? Why did Marie wait almost three years to follow her sixteen-year-old son? And what did he do for those three years while he waited for the rest of the family to arrive?

I am so grateful to have the story my father left me and to have been able to discover a few more facts with the help of archives and my cousins in the U.S. who share my interest in family history. Now that I have the chance to reconnect with my German cousins in Steinbach-Hallenberg, I may even be able to answer some of those questions that remain.

This is most definitely an episode “to be continued.”