CyberQueen at the White House

Part 3

Arriving back in my ebox in the USA, as I expected, Geertjan had not written me an email. It was difficult for me to follow through with my promise to John because I so much wanted to write Geertjan to try to understand more about why he had been so totally turned off by my presence. Luckily, my attention was distracted from writing him an email by loud music, singing and dancing coming down through the hallways of the central building on campus where the computer lab was located. There was some kind of demonstration going on and I wanted to get a closer look at it to take pictures of the activities. So I quickly logged out and ran outside as the protestors marched through the building.

I wasn’t afraid at all to be in the crowd even though I was only one of the few white people with the marchers. There were banners representing several parties like the Pan-African Congress and the Socialist party. The marchers ended their march at the Administration building where several of the black student leaders shouted out their demands over a megaphone. Since this was the first week of school, their concerns were the same as one would find at the University of Massachusetts where I have spent so much time as part of student activism on campus. Their demands were that the university offer more student loans to students so that they could buy the text books they needed to pass the examinations. Also, there was a housing shortage on campus and the protesters wanted temporary housing for the students who had been accepted. There were no women speakers; the black student leadership seemed to be all male. Finally, to end the rally, the white male Chancellor came out of his office and addressed the crowd. He informed us that he was working to meet the student needs and that money for books would be forthcoming. The black student leaders seemed pleased with what he had said. After the Chancellor and the student leaders shook hands and smiled for a few photographs taken by the local press, the rally adjourned.

I approached the student leaders afterwards introducing myself as a political activist from the United States who has been researching student activism on campus. I told them that I thought their protest movement needed to go deeper into the problem of how to eliminate poverty than just setting their goals at the text book level. They needed to not forget about the shanty towns from which they came and realize that the mission of intelligent people around the world was to find a way to eliminate poverty and transform the shanty towns into ecocities and ecovillages where people’s natural love of life could fully blossom. I felt that to be effective, to be a movement for the people, they needed their demonstrations to take on the issue of rehousing South Africans. They needed to set up a shanty-town on campus and boycott classes until there was a general dialogue created about what was the best and quickest way to end the classist war happening in South Africa and throughout the rest of the world. I told him that I had been witness to enough student compromise sessions between chancellors and students in the United States to know that the administration only gives lip-service to student needs. They have no intention of creating the intellectual environment necessary for true dialogue to occur with the potential of changing the power structure of society. The administration was only interested in maintaining the status quo and adding some people of non-European descent to the campus so that they could claim to be a multi-racial campus. But the truth was that the colonial mindset was still in control of people’s desires and longings as they thought that education was the way to buy the good life: jobs, family, cars, houses, food, vacations, and tickets to Hollywood movies. As we were talking, a voice inside me asked, “now why would these African student leaders listen to my wisdom since I am a nobody white woman? Students in the United States don’t think I have anything important to say, so why would they?”

ARIZONA

Raising the questions about the European model of education, carried my thoughts back to my trip to Arizona which I took with my parents in May of ‘94. Their graduation gift was to take me to see the places I had written about in my dissertation, the places that had inspired me to see that what we needed to survive in peace was a feminist theory of architecture and that as we approached the 21st Century, a new archetype in architecture was evolving. Not only did we visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, Paolo’s Soleri’s Arcosanti and the Biosphere Two project, but we went to Monument Valley on the Navajo Reservation as well and walked through the Anasazi ruins.

It was at the Navajo Reservation that I really began to see the effects of Western “education”. On our tour through Monument Valley, we saw this very green grass field beside a large brick building with an American flag outside of it. It was one of the strangest sights to see out there in the desert. You can imagine how artificial the grass field looked out there in the desert on a land where no green grass grows! Our Native American guide said that it was the sports field of the local high school on the reservation. The school administration felt that the students really needed the sports field to learn how to play football so that they would be able to compete for sports scholarships. I recalled what Rudolf Kaiser author of The Voice of the Great Spirit wrote about the way the Native American way of life was being destroyed by the white man.

After the United States paid fifteen million dollars for the land north of the Rio Grande, the government believed that it owned all the land including the Hopi territory. But the Hopi and the other Native American peoples thought that land is the property of the Great Spirit, not a commodity to be bought and sold. The federal government in 1887 passed the Dawson Act which tried forcing Indian reservations to divide the communally owned land among the families of the various tribe. This was an attempt to make the Native Americans adopt the idea of private property. The law was forced on the Hopi. Their land was to be divided into lots of a certain size and distributed to heads of households. The remaining land was then to be sold.

The idea of private ownership of land was sacrilegious to Native Americas. For them, the land was given to them by the Great Spirit to be cared for by humans. When the white land surveyors placed rods in the ground to designate the different lots, The Hopi removed the rods. This resulted in the US army being called in to arrest the perpetuators.

When the six cavalry soldiers rode into Oraibi village, the masses of people had gathered in the village square. Two figures came forth to speak for the masses. One was Masau who the Hopi worshipped as the lord over life and death, the Great Spirit of the Earth. The second figure was Spider Woman, the benevolent grandmother in many Hopi legends and myths. These two figures “declared war” on the cavalry and demanded that they withdraw their forces. Not wanting to battle with the Indians, the cavalry retreated. Weeks later, they came back with more forces and imprisoned a few of the Hopi. In 1911, the White man’s plan to privatize the land where the Hopi lived was officially abandoned.

In 1887 a government school was opened in Keams Canyon, a government settlement. But very few Hopi families wanted to send their children to a “White” school. By 1890, only three Hopi boys were sent to the school. Until 1911, the Cavalry would capture children from Hopi villages or kidnap them from their parents in order to take them to school. At schools they could not speak their native languages. They had to cut their hair and dress like the white children. Sometimes they were kept in boarding schools for years before they were allowed to see their families. The goals of the Naive American’s assimilation into white culture was so that the children would forget the ways of the ancestors and adopt the White man’s ways. Kaiser writes:

The explicit aim of these schools was to estrange the children from their parents’ way of life. In most cases they succeeded in that goal, but these Hopi children did not adopt as an alternative the white man’s ways. Caught between the standards, values, and attitudes of two so radically different cultures, they were often unable to relate constructively with any of the alternatives presented to them and ended up in a vast vacuum. The present problem of alcoholism among Native Americans--also on the increase among the Hopi--is beyond question a consequence of these developments.

The only traditional housing we saw on our tour of Monument Valley was a hogan where an old woman allowed tourists to come into her space and take pictures and ask her questions. Someone asked her what she did with the money she made from the tourists. She said with the money every year she takes a vacation to Hawaii during the winter. Her grandson lived in a ranch-style nuclear family house next to the hogan. There was a big satellite dish outside the house and a pick-up truck. Apparently, they were among the more wealthy members of the reservation. I found it very sad when we drove around the town on the Monument Valley reservation and it was like any other small Western town with a Church, hospital and shopping area where the Native Americans could do normal Western civilization stuff. I wanted to see the old way of life of the Native people, but it didn’t seem to exist, at least, not the way the Navajo lived.

Perhaps the Hopi Reservation would be different since it was more isolated from the white man. But, we didn’t have time to drive there to visit those villages. When we took a tour of the Canyon, we stopped for a while near the White Castle, an ancient cliff dwelling. Navajo’s people were selling jewelry to the tourists and Navajo school children were there playing volley ball while they listened to rock and roll music.

It seemed as if most of the old sacred ways of the Native Americans had been conquered by commercialism and white education. On the highway, we passed billboards advertising the sale of Kachina dolls which at one time where very sacred to the Natives. They felt the dolls possessed spirits. Now the Kachina dolls seemed empty to me sitting on gift shops shelves as tourist items. But I suppose the Natives needed the income from the dolls since they become slaves to the capitalist economy. At the gift stores, a tourist could also buy a sand painting which in traditional Indian medicine is used to heal the sick. I remember learning in an anthropology class that to the Native Americans, a sand painting was not seen as an art object, but the process of the painting helped cure the sick. After it was painted and the healing energy of the painting released, it was destroyed. But now, like the Kachina dolls, the paintings are objects sold to the whites who want to take a piece of authentic Indian culture back to their living rooms in their square European-type houses.

The only place that seemed to be haunted by the Great Spirit was at the Anasazi Ruins. As we drove through Sunset Crater National Park the Anasazi ruins were close to the side of the road. There were no fences around the ruins, so people could just get out of their cars and visit the sites. They were always located in beautiful places overlooking craters or with a view of the San Francisco Twin Peak mountains in the far distance. But what amazed me was that the pueblos where built together like the old Goddess ruins of ancient Europe. These people lived together, several families sharing resources. They didn’t spread out in isolated family housing units the way we do. Why couldn’t we learn the ancient ways and return to a time when we lived together?

The one thing our visit to Arizona revealed to me was that what I had disclosed in my dissertation about patriarchal, Western architecture was indeed correct. Collective living was killed when we started living in isolated nuclear families. The detached suburbia archetype in housing was killing what was left of the Native American culture. When we were at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture school, outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, I thought about his image of the ideal American city which he called Broadacre City. At one time, our guide at Taliesin West said that Taliasin West was far out away from the city lines of Scottsdale, but now the suburban scrawl could be seen encroaching on Taliesin West. I wondered, where was the water coming from to keep all the lawns and golf courses of Phoenix green? Would this linear uncontrolled development be stopped only when the Colorado river ran dry? Or when the Colorado River becomes too toxic to drink with radioactive waste from the nuclear dump site the US government is planning to build at Ward Valley, 20 miles from the river?

The guide said that Wright built Taliesin West far away from civilization to try to escape from it. But there seemed to be no escape from the “American Dream.” How ironic it was that Wright helped build the dream in stone and cement by basing his ideal city in a linear fashion where each family was to have its acre of land as the basis of democracy! It seemed perfectly obvious to me that his pupil at one time, Paolo Soleri, who was building his ideal city, Arconsanti near the other side of Phoenix, was much closer to the direction development should go than Wright’s Broadacre city since his idea of the ideal city was to build it as a three dimension city, what he called the miniaturized city or arcology, a word combining architecture and ecology. Arcology was not a city of the automobile, but it was designed to eliminate the need for private transportation in favor of trains and subways and pedestrian transportation moving people throughout the ecocity. I saw arcology as a way we could finally become free of the automobile and the fossil fuel economy which is destroying the ozone layer that protects us from dangerous ultraviolet radiation. I saw giving up the private automobile for living in an ecocity of mass transportation as a way to solve endless problems which have arisen in the era of automobile production, from the lack of equality of people who don’t have access to cars to millions of acres of land being covered up by cement to make parking lots.

When we went to visit Arconsanti, I was so excited to finally visit the place I had admired for so long. From my understanding of Soleri’s world, I really thought that his plans were the vision of the Future. But visiting Arconsanti left me with mixed emotions. I didn’t see how I would ever be able to call Arcosanti home because I couldn’t see a way I would be able to fit into the community. Since I wasn’t a builder, I couldn’t see me signing up for Soleri’s workshops and then working my way up the ladder to finally be able to rent an apartment at the site. Even though I had written a dissertation which advanced the idea of arcology, Soleri had never recognized me as a theorist. So, I didn’t see how I would be able to work for the cause of arcology at Arcosanti. Diversity of talent seemed to be missing at Arcosanti, at least, for the talent that I had! Soleri sees Arcosanti more as a construction site for his evolutionary urban designs than as an intentional community of revolutionary social architecture.

Our final destination in Arizona was near Tucson to a place called Oracle to see the Biosphere 2. The Biosphere 2 could not have been built in a more beautiful location with an exquisite view of the Santa Catalina mountain range. One morning, after breakfast eagles were circling over Biosphere 2 and the cacti were in bloom. Taking the tour of Biosphere 2 was like taking a journey into the future and I loved every minute of it. But there was another element of Biosphere 2 which I didn’t like. Biosphere 2 had been marketed like it was Disney World to attract tourists to the site. Nevertheless, Biosphere 2 gave me a glimpse into the way I wanted to live as I imaged living in biospheric technology on the moon. As we watched from outside the Biosphere, the Biospherians farming in the organic farm area of the enclosed structure, it dawned on me that the Biosphere was naturally socialistic because the farmer’s job was just as important as the computer scientist’s job of keeping the technology functioning properly. The guide explained to us that since all wastes were recycled, farming had to be done organically since if they used pesticide or herbicides, they would be poisoning themselves.

The guide informed us that the first biospherians to stay inside for 2 years had several major problems to overcome. One of the problems was over food. The biosphere was not producing enough food for them to eat and they were all loosing a lot of weight. Fights broke out over food to the point that the captain had to lock the bananas up so they could be shared fairly. Why I say that the biosphere is naturally socialistic is because when everyone is contributing to the whole to make an organization, or a community, or an ecocity function, then no one needs to receive more pay than the other since everyone is doing their part to make the whole work. As on the Starship Enterprise, there was no money on Biosphere 2. Everyone was required to spend part of the day in the farming area harvesting the crops. So no one could be judged as in a lower-class position.

As we looked through the triangular glass walls, the guide pointed out the goats who were also on board. He said that the Biospherians took turns slaughtering the animals. My heart sunk at the thought that this vessel of the Future had not evolved away from slaughtering animals. I recalled reading that the word ‘tragedy’ was associated with the sacrifice of goats, those poor creatures under human domination.

But this was not the only tragic thing about the way the Biosphere experiment was run. It was certainly not a democracy, but was run by a corporation hoping to patent the inventions which would be created from the experiment. Their hope was to make profits, profits, profits on the new environment to live in which recycled all the wastes and made fresh air for the Biospherians to breath.

It wasn’t hard to imagine a world of tiny Biospheric domes enclosing wealthy neighborhoods; the ultimate security gate system for the rich to keep out the dirty, polluted world of poverty they want to avoid at all costs. The way development was heading, I could clearly see that out of the fear and violence we are confronted with in the large impersonal cities of the postmodern world, the owners of biospheric technology would sell homes under clusters of biospheres built for privacy and security like feudal villages except that these clusters would be connected with the other “civilized” clusters through the Internet and telecommunication networks creating a Cyberfeudalism. The information haves would allow the uninformed serfs into the gates of the biospheric dome during the day to provide personal care and services to the “Lords of Information” who uphold Copyright Law.

I remembered reading an article by John Friedmann in the book, World Cities In A World-System. Under the subtitle, “Techno-apartheid for a global underclass?” he quotes Piccardo Petrella, a technological forecaster. Petrella describes networks of high-tech cities as, “a high- tech archipelago of affluent, hyperdeveloped city regions ... amid a sea of impoverished humanity.. Imagine how such an order would redraw the world map: on one side we would see a dynamic, tightly linked archipelago of technologies constituting less than one-eighths of the world’s population; on the other would be a vast, disconnected and disintegrated wasteland that is home to seven out of every eight inhabitants on Earth.”

One thing I thought was missing from the Biosphere 2 experiment was a Neutopian economic system which would really prove to be an alternative system from the mainstream world of global capitalism, a system based on the collectivization of the resources, the way indigenous peoples have lived. What was missing for the Biosphere 2 experiment? A sense of ethics, that this technology must be used to shelter all people, not only the few, but the multitude. If we don’t live by this basic ethical principle, the cruel “technofascism” which has controlled much of the history making of the 20th Century would continue to destroy us.

Since my visit to Biosphere 2, in 1996 Columbia University has taken over the project. Columbia University convened a committee of scientists to evaluate Biosphere 2. They concluded, “at present there is no demonstrated alternative to maintaining the viability of Earth. No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with the life- supporting services that natural ecosystems produce for free. Dismembering major biomes into small pieces, a consequence of widespread human activities, must be regarded with caution. Despite its mysteries and hazards, Earth remains the only known home that can sustain life.”

Biosphere 2 was declared to be another failed utopian experiment. Not only was there not enough food for the Biospherians to eat, but after a year, the oxygen level fell to dangerously low levels from 21% to 14%. As a result of oxygen metastases in the cold concrete walls, carbon dioxide levels rose. Morning glory vines were introduced to help soak up the carbon dioxide. But they begin overtaking other plants including food crops. The result was that the atmosphere went sour, the sea became acidic, two much rain caused the desert area to become a grassland, crops failed, and all the pollinators went extinct as well as 19 of the 25 vertebrate species. Insects which thrived in the environment were cockroaches, katydids, and millions of crazy ants.

Columbia University decided to not try to re-create the utopian experiment, but to create an opposite type of atmosphere, an “atmospheric hell” as a test of what our environment might be like in the next century with increases in temperatures and high levels of carbon dioxide which are the chief causes of global warming. Scientists want to see how plants and ecosystems respond when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are much greater “to help us devise ways to avoid environmental disasters and maximize benefits from possible changes.” Stephanie Pfirman, science exhibit advisor at Biosphere 2 and chair of the Department of Environmental Science at Barnard College said, “one of the greatest lessons learned from the original Biospherian experiments is that Earth’s systems are complicated, delicately balanced, and capable of dramatic changes that could affect all of us. We need to develop an awareness of our role in causing and preventing climatic changes.” It is hoped that the project will help develop new strategies for planetary management necessary if we are going to avoid planetary catastrophe.

Scientists predict by the year 2030, the level of the CO2 in the atmosphere will be twice as much as it was before the industrial revolution began. This means that global temperature could rise up to 5 degrees Celsius. This warming increase is at least as large as the increase which caused the end of the last ice age.

The originators of Biosphere 2 experiment hoped to create a closed- ecosystem which would allow humans to venture into Outer Space. One of the reasons for this extraterrestial quest was because they wanted to build an environment which could survive a nuclear war for they believed that man’s preparation for war would eventually lead to World War III. What the Biosphere 2 experiment achieved was that it has proven that there is no escape vehicle for our species at this time. We must learn to live in environmental sanity and peace with each other on this planet or we will perish one way or another by creating an atmospheric hell. How was this vital alternative consciousness going to be achieved so that we could eliminate the threat of wars and violence between the have and the have knots, so that we could finally eliminate slavery in all it forms? Was there a way to get people to stop ignoring the problem?

DANCE AT UMASS

During our visit of the Navajo Reservation which surrounds the Hopi Reservation, I bought a pair of moccasins. I wore them during my graduation ceremony from Umass when I received my doctorate in Future Studies. I had decided not to attended the graduation ceremony because I knew it was going to be the same old thing of walking on stage and receiving your diploma as people who know you feel proud or envious or bored. The only reason I had attended graduation ceremonies in the past was to hear the keynote speaker or to attend a protest, like the protest that happened one year when faculty and students organized a protest against the US supported contras in El Salvador and the Iranian drug/arms deal which President Reagan’s men had masterminded. The protest ended quickly after the police escorted the protesters out of the stadium where the graduation was being held as small private air planes circle over the stadium with banners behind them that read, "Umass engineers do it with precision and get big $."

I went to Dean Conti’s office, the Vice Chancellor for Research and Dean of the Graduate School, who arranged plans for the ceremony to ask him if there could be a student speaker at the graduation ceremony. He said that he didn’t think it would be possible because people were even asking him to cut out the main faculty speaker because they felt the ceremony was too long and boring. But I saw the graduation ceremony as the perfect time to try to educate the parents, students, and friends attending the graduation. Thousands of people would be gathered there who could be informed on some important social issue. But, according to Conti, the graduation was designed to please the egotistical parents who only wanted to see their kid walk across the stage in the medieval black robe and square hat to be handed a diploma certifying their child was now a college graduate.

The ceremony seemed so dull, lifeless, and anti-intellectual to me as I listened to Conti explain the ceremony. Umass was really not a place for the advancement of knowledge. It was about pleasing the customers of their academic machine. It was about making sure your child got ahead in the academic hierarchy, but about education? No, the graduation ceremony wasn’t about education! Dean Sam Conti was one of the most anti- intellectual men whom I had ever met. He tried to expel me and two other graduate students in 1989 for taking part in a demonstration at Umass during a national day of action against military research on campus.

At Umass, a group of students who called themselves "People for a Socially Responsible University" staged a rally which led to a direct action take over of the dirt pit dug out where the new engineering building to be named the Knowles Engineering Building was being constructed. Construction workers had to quit working on the pit when students began sitting on the piles of dirt in order to stop the bulldozers. Near the end of the action, students began throwing rocks into the pit. One student decided to pile the rocks together to make them into a memorial to the people around the world who had died as a result of US military research. Another student declared the pile to be a foundation of a people’s university.

In silence, more protesters joined together spontaneously in building a mound. The reverence and dignity of the action reminded me of prehistory during the Neolithic times when thousands of people came together to build such magnificent places as Stonehenge. Then, after the mound was completed, several of the women had the idea of holding a ritual around the mound. After it was completed, we held hands and went around the circle telling our visions of what a people’s university would be like. The day of action was over.

The next day the campus paper reported that students who participated at the demonstration were being identified through a police video tape and could be suspended from the university. These students would also be charged with the three hours of construction time lost caused by disruption of the event. A day or two after that, I received a certified letter in the mail from Dean Conti’s office which said that I had to go in front of the Graduate Research Council to plead my case as to why I was at the demonstration. The Graduate Research Council, composed of two faculty members and the President of the Graduate Student Senate, would decide if I would be expelled from school and what fines I would be responsible for paying to the university.

How nerve racking it was to have to wait for my trial to come up. I was in the process of finishing my dissertation proposal. So, the thought of losing my chance to finish my doctorate was very stressful. Plus, it was clear to me and a few of the other graduate students who were being persecuted that we had been selected to become scapegoats for the administration to inflict punishment on since there were at least one hundred or so people at the demonstration. When I went to the Collegian to tell them the story of my persecution, they were not interested in covering the story. They didn’t think it was newsworthy.

The day of my trial, a witch hunt, finally came around. Charles, my husband at-the-time, came with me. I also brought a tape recorder so that I could tape the meeting. But since one of the faculty council members refused to give me permission to tape, I wasn’t allowed to turn it on. My defense was that I was at the demonstration as a documentary artist and a scholar who had been studying student activism on campus for a number of years. I told them that I felt it was my human right as an artist and as a journalist to be present at the demonstration.

There was one right-wing faculty member from the department of Food and Natural Resources who was out to expel me. He questioned me about exactly what I did at the demonstration. So we turned off the lights in the room, turned on the slide projector, and I showed them the slides I had taken of the students building the mound and the peace ritual which took place around it.

The faculty members said that since in one of the slides I was holding up a banner with the word LOVOLUTION printed on it, my defense that I was a journalist at the demonstration didn’t hold up since holding the banner meant that I was actually participating in the demonstration. Since a journalist, in their eyes, was suppose to be a neutral, apolitical agent, they said that my participation disqualified me from being a journalist. I told them that I was a documentary artist and that, as a human being, I had the right to participate in a demonstration against social injustices like the military research being conducted on campus. The graduate senate president said that she would not find me guilty if I promised the Graduate Research Council that I would stop going to demonstrations and documenting student protests. She said that if I gave my word that I would not go to another student demonstration, then I would be free to finish my doctorate at the university.

"Wow!" I thought to myself, "Is this democracy at work?" I told her that as an artist and a defender of freedom of speech and freedom of expression, I could not make such a promise. If I made such a promise, I would no longer be free to follow my conscience and document the events on campus which I felt were important events to record. Recording such actions was part of my research. I could not give her my word and be a free person at the same time. Two days later, I got a letter from the Graduate Research Council that said that they were dropping the charges against me. The vote had been two to one. At that point, I wanted to bring charges of harassment and mental abuse against them, but I didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer.

BACK TO THE GRADUATION CEREMONY

My parents wanted to come up to the graduation ceremony but only if I promised not to do anything weird. When I said that I couldn’t promise that, we decided to meet each other in Phoenix and celebrate my doctorate while driving around the Grand Canyon State. My mother knew me well enough to know that at public gatherings I loved to make public statements about my dissension. So when I wouldn’t make that promise to her, she said that they wouldn’t come to the ceremony. Then I felt free to make a one-woman social protest at the graduation ceremony without shaming my beloved parents.

I decided that what I would do would be to hold up a banner with the saying "Liberate Wisdom from Dollars". Yes, that summed up how I felt about the "educational" system. Wisdom would not survive in spaces like Umass because the university system did not value wisdom, knowledge, and human compassion, but only valued money, business, and having the "competitive edge". The people who ruled Umass were the money makers and the politicians, not for the benefit of the people, but to make the people into brainwashed consumers who all dreamed about owning upper- middle class houses and being able to send their kids to college.

The night before the graduation ceremony, I went over to see my mentor, Dame Phyllis. We practiced what I would do when it was my turn to receive my diploma. I was to hide the banner underneath my robe and then when I was bent over to be "hooded," when they placed this 100 dollar hood over my head, I would reach underneath my robe and pull out the banner. So I practiced and practiced the movement until I got it down perfectly.

The ceremony took place in the Mullin Center. It was the new sports arena built during a time when the budget cuts at Umass had destroyed many good programs like Future Studies which I was a part of. In fact, I was the last Futurist to graduate from the program. Yes, friends, while students in Future Studies fought with the administration who lied to us about saving our program, Umass was speeding ahead with making Umass the number one basketball team in the nation. They had millions of dollars to invest in housing the basketball team, but not a penny to hire teachers to teach Future Studies.

The Administration’s excuse for this intellectual atrocity was because some very rich person had given a gift of millions of dollars to build the Mullins Center. The gift donor said that the money couldn’t go for anything other than to build the sports arena. So this was one way the rich manipulated the university system to bind minds to their way of thinking. I could hear the New Romans in their luxurious special glassed-in room on the top floor which looked down onto the arena of the Mullins Center say, "Give the plebeians bread and circuses. That will make those idiot students happy while they are in school. Weekends when no sports events are scheduled, we’ll bring in big name rock bands and make them pay big bucks for the tickets."

Something evil was stalking Umass. Just walking on the campus a sensitive person could feel the dead energy which had slowly taken over the university since the Reagan regime. The university which was once a public institution was now ruled by corporations. It was not a friendly place for non-traditional students and the poor. There were no more free concerts around the campus pond. When it was time for the big spring concert, workers put up plastic orange fences around the concert area so that only people with student Ids could get in. Students were no longer spoken of as students by Administrations, but as customers. The university was for sale to the highest corporate bidder. In Dr. Marc Kenen’s newspaper "Umass Goes Private!", he explains how Umass was sold out.

In 1989, half of the US budget went to the Department of Defense (DoD). Billions of dollars were going into research and development of a new generation of technological weapons for the computer age so that the United States would be one step ahead of the USSR in the global nuclear arms race. The state of Massachusetts received a large portion of DoD money which made the state come out of the recession of the late 70’s and early 80’s. This made Massachusetts’ high-tech industry bloom into one of the centers of the world-wide computer revolution.

Research conducted at Umass and MIT provided Massachusetts defense contractors like General Electric, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Digital Equipment, GTE, AVCO and Northrup with the information they needed to go forth with high-tech weapons production. Research universities became an essential part of the military-industrial complex as huge industrial projects took place inside university labs. Also, the Patent and Trademark Amendments of 1980, allowed universities to patent research which was sponsored by federal money. These exclusive licenses allowed a university to sell rights to patents to industries for profit. Kenen writes, "Since the profit motive becomes the primary criteria for deciding research priorities, no longer does the university have the ability to develop its own priorities. It has become hostage to the marketplace. A marketplace where researches are scarce and competition is fierce."

To illustrate his point, he told the story about how in the late ‘70’s Umass was a leader in solar engineering research. Its wind power program was the best in the country. Senator Silvio Conte helped get $800,000 grant from Congress for the program and hoped to get more in the coming years to finance a building for the department of Solar Engineering. But the Mechanical Engineering Department backed by oil, gas, coal or nuclear energy supporters refused to give the necessary support for the Solar Engineering Department to grow. Since solar energy is a threat to the fossil fuel and nuclear energy regime, it isn’t surprising how programs which threaten the status quo do not get funded.

During the time of the military build-up, from FY 1981-86 Massachusetts was receiving nearly 11% of all DoD research and development contracts and was third in the country in Star Wars research funding. With the bloom in the economy, there were more jobs, more people with spending money, and thus, more tax revenues from the State. The State had more money to spend on higher education and human services.

But by 1987, things started to change as increases in the military budget began to level off. Massachusetts was deeply dependent on these contracts for its economic security. Also, Massachusetts was now no longer the center of the computer revolution as other places in the world became the leaders in marketing mini-computer technology. GE, Wang, Digital, and other major employers began to lay off workers. This, of course, affected the state revenue. During the time of the Reagan military build-up, Reaganomics also gave the rich tax breaks and cut vast amounts of money from social programs. States were now responsible for finding ways to fund social programs cut from the federal budget. Kenen writes, "The effect of these cuts on state governments was staggering. Over $4.3 billion in federal money needed to maintain level services was cut from Massachusetts alone."

How this affected Umass was that during the beginning of the 1990-1 school year, the Umass administration was informed that $16 million dollars had been cut from the state appropriation. The Faculty Senate decided that the best way to deal with the cuts was to target certain areas and programs for large reductions rather than to have "across the board" cuts in all academic areas. On September 27, 1990, the Faculty Senate voted to go ahead with program terminations and reductions as a way of cutting academic areas from the campus. Administrators then met in a private meeting to discuss the criteria for what to cut. They decided to cut programs which didn’t have a strong undergraduate teaching program or graduate programs that were not producing scholarly works which were "extensive and exceptional."

Hardest hit by the cuts was the School of Education. Dean Marilyn Haring-Hidore (whom we called Gold Finger since she let one of her baby finger fingernails grow extra long and then painted it gold) was hired to do the ax work for the Administration. Faculty was forced into early retirement. Others were moved into other programs. Students who were part of the programs being cut were sent letters that they had to complete their doctorates by a certain date or else they would have to find another university in which to get a doctorate. It was a terrible time to be a doctoral student at the School of Education watching all the faculty fighting with the administration and their own colleagues for their jobs and the right for their programs to continue to be funded. But there seemed little that anyone could do through the official channels. The decision had been made through the Whitmore Administration; they assigned Gold Finger to carry out their orders. There wasn’t a democratic body to go to within the university to vote to reverse the decisions or even a place to create a public dialogue about the seriousness of the problem.

People were completely disempowered. Students from the Future Studies Program had several meetings with Whitmore Administrators and the Dean to plead our case as to why Future Studies should have a future at the School of Education, but all we got from them were empty promises and smiles that they would do everything they could to save the program when the truth was they did everything they could to destroy the program. A few students, like myself, felt that we shouldn’t try to negotiate with the Administration but take our cause to the street by actions of civil disobedience and to take our story to the press. But other students in Future Studies felt that if we took to such radical actions, the Administration would never allow us to survive.

As it turned out, trying to negotiate with the Administration resulted in the death of Future Studies, a 20 year old program, created out of the student rights and anti-war movement of the early ‘70’s. The program was famous for innovating such things as solar power programs and introducing computers into the classroom, but the conservative-minded Administration hated it because it allowed students the freedom to create their own degree plans and because it was student-run. Future Studies became a think tank of very idealistic, ethical people who didn’t want to except outside funding from multi-national corporations or the Department of Defense. The people I knew in Future Studies at the School of Education were interested in making the future better for all people. They did not want their research used as a way to make the rich few even richer for this would surely result in the death of our world.

After these vicious cuts were carried out, the Administration decided to try another strategy for budget cutting. They would not identify programs to be cut because of their weakness, but they would target departments for their strengths and these "priority programs" would be marked to receive funding. "Priority programs should be identified, based upon the criteria of centrality to the mission of the university; the quality and extent of teaching, research and artistic contributions; multiculturalism; reputation, intellectual liveliness and uniqueness; and our public service mission."

The Faculty Senate Research Council set up a process through which to target priority programs. The process became known as the A.B.C’s of budget cuts. "A" stood for a top research department, "B" stood for high teaching productivity; and "C" stood for a program which was central to the university mission; or programs could receive no rating at all. 80% of programs which received "A" or "B" mark were protected from budget cuts. Other programs were left with having to deal with less. Cuts were made on the college and school level, not at the program level as it was before. Deans of particular schools would receive their share of the budget, and then they would be responsible for seeing how the funds were spent according to the university mission.

It is not surprising that the schools which became the priority programs were the ones which could bring in the most outside money. Because the university had become dependent on outside funding during the years of the Reagan military build-up, administrators throughout the country felt that it was necessary to back fields which would be of interest to the military and their industrial contractors such as hard sciences, engineering and computer science as they eliminated entire programs in the social sciences and humanities. Throughout the country, professors and graduate students had to seek grants from the military, or else watch their research go under.

At Umass, three departments became the star programs since they were the ones who could bring in the most outside money: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Polymer Science and Engineering. Second in line were Neuroscience, Molecular and Cell Biology and Biotechnology.

During the budget crisis, the three star departments not only were maintained, but grew. Three different construction projects were started to expand the research facilities of these three departments: the Knowles Engineering Building; the Silvio Conte Polymer Science building; and the Computer Science department expansion into the Graduate School area of offices in the Lederle Research Center. These projects continued when not only state money was being cut from Umass, but federal research money was also being cut. DoD decided to cut large funds to Umass for several reasons: one being because in the Spring 1989, student protests over military research on campus had brought bad publicity to military research. The second reason was because the small decrease of funds from the Federal government to the DoD was starting to trickle down to the university level.

The Cold War was now over and people started talking about steering research into civil efforts and economic conversion from a war-time economy to a peace-time economy. But this economic conversion dialogue never really was able to fully develop at Umass as the US war/industrial machine went on and on and on. Even though Dr. Kenen was calling for the democratization of the university, this did not occur. Kenen writes, "The University must detach it’s decision-making process from the influence of these outside forces and democratize. On the campus level, administrators must be chosen through free elections by those who know best, the students, staff and faculty. Only through this type of democratic process can the university begin the process that will restore its designated role in the Commonwealth." The Administration promised to hold on-going public forums on ethics and military research which also never occurred.

The national trend to privatize universities continues as students at Umass struggle to keep their student businesses like Earth Foods Cafe, the vegetarian restaurant on campus, from going bankrupt because the Administration wants to replace the University Food Services with a "Food Court" to house transnational food franchisees like McDonalds and Taco Bell. The Administration has been plotting this take-over for a number of years without really involving students in the decision- making process. Also, their plan is to institute a new high-tech ID system called "AT&T All Campus Card" which is directly connected with an electronic banking system. ID owners will be able to purchase items from campus retail, vending and food operations after establishing a debit account. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see that in the future no one will have any access to the university, its libraries or its buildings and certainly not its email accounts without an ID!

Fast forward to March, 1997

My strong belief is that to prevent the military industrial complex from destroying education by churning out Umass clones, there must be a world-wide mass movement with students on campuses from all over the world leading the way. No other force would be strong enough to make the war machine tumble and bring life back into the university system with the goal of creating a world-wide network of ecocities. For the decade and a half since I have been studying student activism, I have witnessed a pattern of student activism which occurs when the spirit of change is in the air, when some issue has brought students together to struggle for the Cause. But just what is the Cause?

This semester’s progressive student protest at Umass was focused on an agreement made in 1992 between the Administration and the ALANA (Asian, Latin American, African and Native American) student coalition which was mediated by the US Department of Justice. It was called the 1992 ALANA Agreements. This document was made after 350 students occupied the Whitmore Administration Building when students rallied together in protest to the Rodney King verdict. Four police officers were acquitted by an all-white jury of brutally beating up Rodney King despite a video tape of the brutal actions which proved to the US TV public that the four officers were clearly guilty and that the US justice system is clearly racist. In a reaction to the verdict, students around the country began protesting. Students at Umass marched to the Whitmore Administration building demanding that the Administration hire ten new ALANA faculty members within the next three years, five males and five females.

The next protest led to the occupation of Memorial Hall on Columbus Day. These students were protesting the 500 years of violence against Native Americans. Their demands were to set up 40 scholarships for low-income, people of color and start programs which supported students of color. Also, they requested that the University not recognize Columbus Day as a holiday but, instead, hold a teach-in on Columbus Day about the genocidal policies within American politics.

But since the 1992 ALANA agreements were made, there had been little progress to carry out the agreements made by the Administration and the ALANA students. So March 3, 1997, the ALANA students organized another occupation. This time they took over the "Controller’s Office" on the fourth floor of the Goodell Building. The Controller’s Office is responsible for paying the bills, processing purchase orders and payrolls, and collecting grant moneys.

The goal of the occupation of the "Controller’s Office" was to negotiate with the Chancellor’s office over their list of 40 demands. Some of the demands were: Eliminating the hold on students during pre- registration due to outstanding bursar’s bill; individualized payment plans for all students per semester, starting Fall ‘97; Diversity Whitmore from the top down; hiring minorities in key positions of power; as positions become available these key positions should be targeted to minorities--at least two candidates who are ALANA be presented to the Chancellor for the next opening for Vice Chancellor; better childcare. The demands go on and on about how to reform the system so that minority students can have a way to make it through Umass and for them to have more decision-making power within the bureaucratic order.

Well, after reading these demands, I decided that I would not participate in the rallies because I had an intuition that my analysis of what needed to happen if Umass was to become a place of justice was too radical for some of their minds. The Neutopian struggle was to create a new vision of what the purpose of education is about, to create a world which lives in balance with the ecology and justice for all, a world as Phyllis loves to say where "all goods and services are free to all people at all times." I had written an essay analyzing the mission of the university some years ago. If the students wanted to stop the alienation at Umass, and the world, I believed that they had to change the mission of the university if they really wanted to create a non- racist, non-sexist, non-classist world. Changing the mission statement would allow them to change the political and social structure of the university, and, thus, to have the ideological power to create a social revolution necessary for implementing the revolutionary change of thought.

My passion to try to communicate with the students was just too great. Activism was my passion because I saw it as a way to create an alternative culture and a way to create an environment where love could grow. I recalled the words of philosopher Robert O. Johann, "There can be no love without justice, and no justice with love. Love without justice is mere sentimentality. Justice without love is at best a contentious legalism." I felt that the only place were love could possibly be found in Amherst was at the rally since it was the only place in town which was openly struggling for justice. So one morning, after working on the _Cyberqueen_, I rode my bike to the afternoon rally to see what was going on and if there was room for outside participation.

What I found when I got there was that the police had locked the doors of the Goodell Building where 150 students had been living for several days. They had shut off the phone lines and prevented access to the students inside. However, outside supporters were able to leave blankets, food, toiletries, medicines and money to the inside protesters.

Also, a Tent City had been formed outside Goodell Building so that a 24 hour vigil was conducted in support of the activities going on inside the building. 50 to 70 students slept outside in tents in the cold rain and snow to show their solidarity with the protesters inside the building. The outside activities and rally became just as important as the inside negotiations since the rallies where attracting as many as 1500 students from all-five campuses. March 6th, there was a general call for students to walk out of their classes and join the rally. I attended this rally.

It seemed that an African student named Tony was the one in charge of who got to speak at the microphone. He then gave a long speech about student unity. He said that everyone was part of the same family and that we all needed to have access to the good things of life like a house, a good job, a car and a way to send our children to college. (I would have liked to debate him on the purpose of education and his status quo image of the good life, but there was no space for debate and dialogue at the podium). After his speech, he led the crowd in a number of chants such as "NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE." Finally he opened up the forum to the public.

I was second in line to be able to speak. When it was my turn, I spoke about the history of protest at Umass, the problem with military research money and the CIA on campus. I told the crowd that I thought this activity was part of a world-wide millenarian movement to create a government of love on the planet where everyones’ special gifts would be liberated. This liberation of the human soul was necessary to create a just world. I spoke about how the problems were deep. We needed time and space to really go into the depth of our hearts and souls to cure the ancient problems which revolution after revolution had attempted to do, but has failed to achieve. I asked, "why does the potential for revolutionary activity continue to be suppressed? Why can’t we see beyond the capitalist university, to a place where everyone is free to learn, a nurturing environment where love and cooperation is valued instead of individual greed and global competition?"

I plead with students to not give into the Administration and to continue to hold open forums on the future of the university. To simply get the Administration to promise to implement the list of demands was insufficient to solve the problems of the world. We needed to rebuild the university using solar engineering making Umass a model of ecological architecture and a life-style of healthy and life-long learning for the entire community. I asked, "How else will we be able to create a lovolution, a non-violent social revolution?"

The first thing to do in order to move us into this era of peace and love is to create an alternative democratic government to replace the Chancellor’s office with a democratic forum. There can never be justice at Umass with the Chancellor making 149,000 dollars a year plus all his perks while social science and art students are victims of "financial slaughter."

I waved towards the Whitmore Administrative Building saying, "Bye-bye, Chancellor Scott! When you get back from your vacation on the beaches of Mexico, you will be faced with a new form of government at the helm, the democracy/meritocracy model guiding Umass into the Golden Age, based not on dollars and profits, but on female wisdom and Future Studies." I ended my speech by telling the students that the basis of democratic governance is an open forum where everyone is free to express their diversity. Diversity is not just about having a campus dotted with different skin colors and ethnic origins, it is about the diversity of the human soul, allowing everyone’s gifts to be valued for the common good. I explained how we were moving from the Empire Era to the Planetary Era, from a civilization to what Dr. Ketner in his book Biosophy and Spiritual Democracy: A Basis for World Peace described as "soulization" when the development of the soul becomes the primary focus of education and community life.

To make Umass into a good place, there needed to be an on-going rally as the basis of a new governance structure so that we could have a way to find out who our leaders of virtue and talent are, who the teachers of the future are, and how we all fit together. Without this open forum being the basis of a Neu meritocracy, the protest movement would again be suppressed and suppressive, the potential for radical change in consciousness once again silenced.

After my speech, Tony, led the protests in more chants. Other people came up to give announcements. After minutes of dead air, (no one using the mike) I asked Tony if I could speak again. This time he asked me what I wanted to say. I said that I wanted to read two paragraphs which I had downloaded from the Internet that day about a nation-wide student petition about military funding written by William Colby. He signaled me to go ahead and speak. I started to read:

"Petition for New Priorities" - Background Info

In the last two years, the U.S. Congress has tried to cut billions of dollars from domestic programs like welfare, student aid, and enforcing environmental laws while preserving $150 billion in corporate welfare. Politicians have said that we must "make sacrifices" in order to reduce the deficit. However, these three domestic programs together amount to less than one-quarter of the military budget, which has been spared from cuts.

We now spend over $260 billion in tax dollars every year on the military, including nuclear weapons programs. Even though the Cold War ended 7 years ago, we spend 90% as much on the military now as we did from 1950-1990. Many respected military analysts have detailed how the Pentagon could cut spending by up to 50% and still meet U.S. national security needs. We spend 17 times the combined military budgets of all potential adversaries. By spreading U.S.-made arms all over the world, we may actually increase the potential for war. In October of 1996, the Congress and the President approved a 1997 military budget with $9.4 billion more than the Pentagon requested.

Before I finished, Tony came to my side and told me to give him the microphone. He said that the open mike time was over and that I was not permitted to finish the two paragraphs. Then several other males came up to me and said that I couldn’t speak anymore. Still clutching onto the microphone for dear life, I informed the audience that the organizers were insisting that I give up the microphone and that I could not finish the statement about military money and corporate welfare. I told them that I felt that what he was doing to me was the most serious problem the world faced, the censorship of enlightening ideas.

We had to work out a politics of the microphone if we were ever going to be able to establish an alternative vision. And who was this Tony fellow anyway? Why was he suppressing me? Was he a CIA agent? Or was he simply infected by the disease of patriarchal domination? Still holding the microphone, I asked the crowd if there was a Collegian reporter there because I wanted them to make a note about what was happening to me at the rally, that my voice, a voice for world peace, was being oppressed.

A woman in the audience asked me a question about what was going on. When I tried to start a dialogue with her and hear what she had to say, Tony grabbed the microphone from my hand and started chanting into the microphone, "NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE; NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!" The clones of Umass followed him as the chant became a way to crush my voice, covering up my cries that what they were doing to me was against my right to free speech. Another woman with a stone-cold face started screaming in my face, "NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE." She was heartless towards me. It was clear she had no idea about how she and the others were violating my human rights.

Images of US-make tanks, machine guns, biological and chemical weapons, neutron bombs and atomic missiles flashed through my soul as the chants became more and more vicious as Tony and others started ridiculing me. What could I do to stop the mobocracy? Was there anything I could do?

My only recourse was to dance around Tony who had the mike tightly pressed to his lips. I started hearing the Turkish music inside my soul, my arms moving around him like the Goddess of Anatolia thinking about my love for Ozguc, whose name means inner power, and all the human rights abuses which were going on in Turkey and other places around the world where US arms were being sold. It made me sick to read on the Internet that a US arms company made 113 million dollars selling the Turkish State/Mafia two "Sea Hawk" military helicopters so that they can continue to carry out their war against political activists and the Kurdish population.

Inside Turkish prisons torture methods "include being stripped naked and blindfolded, hosing with pressurized ice- cold water, hanging by the arms or wrists bound behind the victim's back, electric shocks, beating the soles of the feet, death threats and sexual assault." After the police had said that the torture of children was not permitted, at the Manisa testimonies one 14-year-old boy told his story of being tortured which were supported by medical reports from the hospital where the boy was being treated. He said:

I had to undress...They asked questions that had nothing to do with me; when I said I did not know, they twisted my testicles...Four of them held me by the hands and arms and gave electric shocks to my right thumb, to my sexual organs, to my arms and to my stomach... Afterwards I had no feeling in my right foot and sexual organ.

On the Usenet Newsgroup, misc.progressive.activism, I would read articles on the situation in Turkey. Reports from Amnesty International listed names of people who had recently been arrested by the police in Turkey. My hands start sweating as I scroll down the names of the victims of the US supported Mafia controlled Turkish police state praying that I would not see my beloved Ozguc’s name. I would sigh with relief when my eyes finished the list and his name was not there. But what about all the other names who were not so lucky? When would the day come when I wasn’t so lucky? How will we ever overcome this militaristic consciousness? Dear Great Goddess, will we ever evolve? Would the students ever realize that what they were struggling for was to build Neutopia, a world without war?

Terribly upset with what happened to me at the rally, I got on my bike and started peddling home. I began to notice that I was seeing strange lights in the corners of my eyes similar to an LSD experiment when the tripper begins seeing trails. It was as if my mind had been opened up to some cosmic information and it was coming into my mind so quickly that it was causing light flashes at the corners of my eyes. I guess I will never know exactly why I was feeling like I was tripping, but when I got home, there was a letter from Ozguc. This was the first communication he had sent me in two months. When I read the first line of the letter when he addressed me as Sweet Flower, I broke down in tears.

Later that evening when I went into town to a coffee shop to be with people because I didn’t want to be alone, I started talking with a fellow I had known from the Sirius Community, an Intentional Community in Shutesbury, MA. He wanted to know about my work on the Internet, but instead, I told him my story about getting suppressed at the student rally. He said that perhaps the greatest thing about the Usenet Forum was that everyone could be heard. Yes, it was the only truly democratic global forum that the world had ever known, but I felt that it was no substitute for the energy generated from real life action, from the power of people face-to-face exercising their freedom of assembly. This power of the people was the only way that public buildings could be taken over and for the Administration to be overthrown. It was the only way that the basis of community--true love--could grow among people. Usenet could be a place where I could get my message out to the masses of Netizens, but it was not the way I would be able to overcome my feeling of isolation and alienation from the outside world. I was dying from the lack of intimate touch, daily personal contact with other like- minded spirits, students to share my insights with, and an ecologically sound community where I had a responsible role to play.

In the special Saturday edition of the campus paper the Collegian printed to propagandize the story on the end of the Goodell occupation, the only photo of the rally was a photo of Tony speaking at the microphone. Now, why out of the hundreds of speakers who spoke during the rally was Tony the one who the Collegian chose to publicize? This was the man who had suppressed my right to speak! So I called the Collegian and talked with Thang Vo the photo editor. He said that they published his image because "he was so outspoken and had such good things to say." Of course, there was no note about how Tony intellectually abused me in front of 1,000 students at the rally in the Collegian reports since that is the way the mainstream media works; it covers up the more profound stories going on right in front of them so that the thugs in power can continue their reign of terror.

After the six-day occupation of the Goodell building, the Administration agreed to 21 commitments. It was reported that the students chose to leave by consensus-making process. However, Administrators informed the student negotiators that if they were still in the building at 3:00 am Saturday morning, the police would come in and forcibly remove the protesters. After further talks, the pull-out time was changed to noon time, Saturday, March 8th. The Collegian writes, "According to the Administration, protesters who do not vacate the premises at the agreed- upon time will be arrested; if arrests are made, the University will not be bound to fulfill their latest commitments to the students."

The Administration knew it was using intellectual blackmail in its threat to use force against the students. They wanted business back as usual with or without the use of force because the mood on the campus was becoming revolutionary with students walking out of classes to attend the rallies. Administrators knew the rallies were growing larger with each passing day. I am using Herbert Marcus’ definition of revolution here. He writes in his essay "Ethics and Revolution," that revolution is "the overthrow of a legally established government and constitution by a social class or movement with the aim of altering the social as well as the political structure. This definition excludes all military coups, palace revolutions, and "preventive" counterrevolution (such as Fascism and Nazism) because they do not alter the basic social structure."

My honest opinion is that the only place on campus which was really educating the students was at the rallies where students were forming a self-empowering community of scholars who through their diverse knowledge would find a way to solve the global/local problems using alternative technologies and Neutopian politics, but this took time and space to learn how to think together, exactly what the Administration didn’t want to give the students... time and space where student dissatisfaction and frustration with the present system could grow into a mass movement for revolutionary social change needed for planetary transformation.

It would be better publicity for the Administration if the students walked out of the Goodell Building without police arrests. But Administration sensed that the movement was becoming powerful and it had to be stopped since the power of the open forum could destroy the oppressive university dictatorship. They also knew that meeting the 21 demands would shut the students up for another semester. For the Administration to state that any protesters who remained in the building would be arrested and would jeopardize the 21 commitments promised by the Administration, made a minority voice within the protest movement very difficult since any student who felt that she/he was selling out to the Administration and that the protesters should remain, would be seen by the majority as a divisive action.

I went to talk with Dr. Kenen at his Umass office about this impression of the Goodell occupation. I asked, "Why did the students demands miss the larger picture issues of creating social justice world-wide?" Kenen, who his been working on an update to "Umass Goes Private," said that it was difficult to get the student negotiating team to listen to the knowledge that he had gained from his years of student activism on campus. He tried to get to talk with the negotiating team, but he said there was one white graduate student male on the team who didn’t want Kenen to participate. Kenen felt the reason for this was a power issue. Kenen believed that the male graduate student felt that he was the representative of the white race and didn’t want Kenen around to be another white male voice. The negotiating team was mostly students of color. Unfortunately, this exclusive attitude within the student negotiating team, when a small clique of people become the new authority who wheels and deals with the Administration, seems to be reflective of the old system where only the privileged few have access to power.

So Kenen’s insights into the budget problems had no way to get heard to the student decision makers. Kenen’s one message that he wanted to get across to the student negotiating team was that the budget of Umass had increased every year since 1994. For the Administration to act as if there was no money to fund their demands was a lie. However, what was happening with the increase in the budget was that it was going to strengthen the priority programs so that Umass could become one of the nation’s top research institutions. Kenen said a large part of the budget increase was going into building two new buildings on campus: one for the computer science department and another engineering building. So there was money, but the students and the people didn’t have a say as to how the future of the university would develop. This was controlled by the Administration who was controlled by capital interests which directed the future for profit-making motives, not for the purpose of building a network of ecocities.

Student leaders had been planning the Goodell occupation for months. Kenen felt the room that they chose to occupy was a very bad choice to conduct a democratic decision-making process. It was a large room, but it was sectioned off in small cubicles by wall dividers which made it impossible for people to gather. Phyllis, who got a glimpse of the student occupation, said that the students looked like they were cattle rounded up into stalls. Kenen said that as in past student demonstrations, the small group of negotiators tried to communicate what was happening in the negotiation sessions with the Administration, but communication was difficult. I also pointed out the people at the rally were only told what was happening inside with the negotiators, but were not included as part of a participatory democratic decision-making process. Inside, Kenen observed, conflicts arose between the student negotiators and their fellow student protesters. The student negotiators felt the need to make compromises with the Administration and the protesters felt the need to make a radical stand against the State.

Kenen said that the final night of the occupation, students argued about what strategy to take until 6:00 am. One thing they all agreed on, they wanted to act in unity. But what was the best way to do this? The negotiating team felt that their demands had been met while other protesters disagreed. They felt that the most strategic path to take was to stay inside as an act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience could have blown up the university allowing the students to see the true insidious nature of the Administration and would have caused the media to have to follow the story for months. However, the student protestors were tired, fearful that they would fail their classes if they were to miss more, and began to think in terms of the status quo: graduating and finding jobs. Compromises made by the student-negotiating team with the Administration seemed to them like the easiest way to get their demands met.

Meeting the 21 student demands and the end of the rallies meant that the "higher educational" system would go on as normal. Exams would be held on time, searches for the new highly-paid minority faculty members would start in order to please the ALANA students, and the graduation ceremony procession would again be lead by Chancellor Scott. Western civilization, as usual, would dominate and be triumphant over the people’s movement for world peace.

FLASH BACK...AGAIN BACK TO THE GRADUATION CEREMONY...

When it came my time to walk on the stage to be "hooded" I wasn’t nervous about my protest action at all. I was really excited that I had the opportunity to express my deep dissatisfaction with a place as hypocritical as Umass. I was protesting for everyone who wanted to develop their characters, but who didn’t have the money for tuition. I was also protesting for all the people who couldn’t fit into the conventional system, pass the examinations and tests. It had become common knowledge among educators that we all learn differently and thus people should be evaluated differently, but the state university system doesn’t listen to this research and hence to restructure education to meet the needs of everyone because when it really came down to it, the university was not about educating people. GRE examinations were still required to get into Umass after researchers had proven that the test cannot determine who are the creative and ethical thinkers and that the tests were biased against minority groups. The University’s undeclared mission was to train people to fit into the capitalist system. It’s about making money. So I was protesting the entire American life-style which had created a world of poverty and ignorance which the school system did not eliminate, but perpetuated.

The Mullins Center was not decorated in festive artworks, but with commercials for Coke and other global corporation advertisements. I could remember a time during the early 80’s when art murals which had been painted during the early 70’s and 60’s were on the walls of campus giving us messages of the days when the students were in rebellion against the state, but those days were long gone. The murals of that exciting and meaningful era had been covered-up. Now, above the center of the stage was the Massachusetts state seal with the image of the Native American man. What was he suppose to be, I wondered, the sacrificial lamb? Over the symbol of the Native American, there is an arm of a white man raised back about to strike a death blow to the head of the Native American below. Native Americans went to the State House a number of years ago to try to get the emblem of destruction changed, but the issued was covered-up. And there I was with my moccasins on.

When I bent down to receive the hood, the banner was revealed to the public as smoothly as I had hoped for. When it was my time to shake hands with the Chancellor and the President of the University system, instead valiantly I held up my banner and walked around in a circle so that everyone would be able to read it. The faculty were sitting on stage with the big-wig administrators. The audience was sitting in the bleachers and the students who were receiving degrees, sat below the stage on the ground floor. After I exhibited the banner, I walked off- stage as everyone else did and took a seat in the chairs where we had begun, but this time my seat was on the end of the aisle where the faculty, led by the Chancellor Scott, would walk after the closing statement. This would give me another opportunity to hold up my banner for the faculty to see.

It took more courage this time to lift the banner in front of my chest. As the academic establishment walked slowly down the stairs in their regal attire, for a second, I felt intimidated and inclined to act as if I didn’t know anything and that I should be paying respect to the leaders of academic knowledge. Who was I to say that wisdom couldn’t survive at Umass? Who was I to go against the entire intellectual community by saying that they were wrong and the majority of them were self-serving and really only used their tenure as a way to maintain large bank accounts, summer homes, sabbaticals overseas, and graduate their children free of charge?

But I laid my self-doubts aside and lifted the banner right before the Chancellor got to my row of chairs. Then to my surprise he stopped the procession and said that he must shake my hand. He congratulated me for receiving my doctorate, but I knew he was just giving me lip-service. I continued to hold my banner up as the faculty passed. Then one of the shocks of my life occurred. I should have expected it, but I guess I was not prepared to see the reaction of the majority of the faculty to my banner. It wasn’t so much their reaction, but their lack of reaction which was so disturbing.

Only a few of the faculty members acknowledged that I was there right in front of them holding up a banner to protest the injustices of the world. They looked right through me as they passed me as if I was invisible or overlooked me by pointing their eyes to the floor or ceiling. Only one or two of them looked at me! One was my art history teacher who specializes in contemporary art and she looked at me twice! It was amazing to me that a person was able to ignore someone right in front of them the way the Umass faculty was slighting me! Then it dawned on me why the problems of civilization continue to be neglected, because the people who rule over ideas refuse to acknowledge the problems! As they walked past, it was as if I was a homeless woman whom they disregarded, or a prostitute on the street whom they held in scorn, or a person with some terrible disease who needed immediate care but for whom they could care less. They just couldn’t accept that I was there protesting for peace, right in front of them as when they looked the other way as they did when Future Studies and other humanitarian programs like Public Health were cut out of Umass’ budget!

I started becoming braver, sticking my foot in the aisle so that they would have to confront me, but still they managed to discount me. It was obvious that these people were experts in ignoring other people with their snobbish, arrogant, conservative and neo-liberal ways. I never wanted to be like these people, but I knew I had been. I had been trained by the school system to pass by homeless people on the cold, cruel streets without giving them a penny or any of my compassion. I had been taught to be heartless, to look the other way at the problems of the world, to just pursue my own little career, establish my own professional reputation and compete with the other scholars in my field for the few tenured faculty positions available at universities.

After the faculty passed outside the Mullin Center, it was time for the new doctors and one doctress to pass out the gates of the arena. The orchestra started playing some passionate piece of classical music and I just couldn’t help myself. I felt so released! I was finally free from the Umass bureaucracy! I no longer had to brown-nose dictatorial teachers for grades or write a paper for no other reason than because it was assigned by the teacher in order to pass the class. I no longer had to submit myself to the authoritarianism of the classroom and the ways of conforming to a repressive educational system which taught me to ignore the problems humanity faces.

The music lifted me into ecstasy. My feet started dancing as the new doctors of philosophy and education marched out of the Mullins Center as if they were robots. But the corporate system had not been able to make me into their automaton. Somehow, I managed to escape, the system without it killing my soul like it had killed most of my colleagues souls. These robots couldn’t feel the music and the ecstasy I was feeling from being a person free enough to not accept the system, but to rebel from the madness which created class warfare in American cities and imperialistic policies in foreign lands like the ones which annihilated most of the Native American way of life. I moved to one side of the floor where I could continue to dance trying to get my peers to join me in the dance of a lifetime, but no one would dance.

So I went inside myself and let the music carry my soul to the grand moment in time, to a place where the scholars and artists of the world come together to create a world where everyone will be able to explore their potential and develop their gifts for the benefit of humankind. When the music and dance was over, I gracefully took a bow and danced out of the Mullin Center into the sun shine. Not one person came up to me and congratulated me on my doctorate as people mingled at the reception. But what did I except? I had no family present. Who would congratulate me? Nobody there cared if I was dead or alive; no one was interested in what I wrote or what their colleagues had written. Most doctoral students didn’t even see their dissertations as works of art and scholarship, but as a requirement to fulfill in order to get a doctorate necessary to get a "good" job inside the corporate market place.

Then I saw professor Doris Shallcross. She had resigned from my dissertation committee after she asked me to remove the part of my opening chapter where I criticized the dissertation committee process for not being open to creative ideas. She felt that I shouldn’t criticize the institution which was giving me a diploma. Anyway, she had been my creativity teacher for a number of years and it was very painful when I saw her and she wouldn’t acknowledge me. The feelings of alienation pierced every cell in my body when I refrained from approaching her and giving her a joyful hug. I felt like such an outcast for having the thoughts that I did.

Finally, I met up with Phyllis who said that she thought the dance was wonderful and she had caught it all with her video camera. What a delight it was to meet up with Phyllis whom I could understand. We had a true intellectual relationship based on intellectual love and mutual understanding of the political situation we found ourselves in in this lifetime and a search for wisdom to create peace of mind in a world at peace.

BACK TO THE HOUSING HIERARCHY IN SOUTH AFRICA

I hope the Arizona detour helped you, dear earnest reader, to understand more about why the Native Africans felt that they had to burn down the school buildings. The educational system of South Africa represented the colonial life-style. Like in America, in Africa the ticket to the affluent life-style is either through education or inheritance or business. After visiting Toilet City and the middle class black neighborhoods around Pietermartizburg, we went to the “other side of the tracks” to drive by the mansions of the rich and powerful South Africans.

The affluent neighborhood looked like an upper-middle class neighborhood where I had grown up in North Carolina. Automatic sprinklers were watering the grass, expensive cars were in the driveways, security systems and fences kept out strangers or revolutionaries! When we passed by one of the larger houses, the government official said that after Mandela’s election, some blacks thought that what was going to happen was that the master’s houses would become their houses, the land stolen from them during the apartheid years would come back to them. But Mandela’s reform programs would not displace the white property owners. His theory was that the apartheid system took decades to construct and it would take decades to dismantle. As he lives in the president’s mansion, he has all the luxuries of the apartheid system while so many of his black comrades still lived in poverty, how could he tell his people to wait, wait, wait, generation after generation, for the better world to come?

Perhaps the Native South Africans had become like the British who pay to keep the Queen of England and her family living in luxurious castles in their properties around the world while the common people are content with small houses and struggling from pay check to pay check just to pay the landlord. Are they living vicariously through the royal family? It makes me sick when I read an article which says that Nelson was honored that the Queen of England was coming to South Africa in celebration: that after decades of being withdrawn from the British commonwealth, they were now asking to return to the Commonwealth with the end of apartheid system. Queen Elizabeth was coming to knight outstanding South Africans with lordship titles. In the article, Nelson admitted that he was an anglophile, was educated in English-speaking schools, and he had no reservations about British titles. After all, within his tribe, he too had royal blood!

Recently, on a television showed call “Biography” they showed one on the life of Nelson Mandala. Of course, in the story he was the undeclared king who became the icon who put an end to the apartheid policies. But what was so distrubing to me in the show was the way they portrayed Winnie. They showed her dressed in guerrilla clothes speaking to the people about the possibility of creating economic justice. Next, they showed her in court in an English dress of a lady pleading her case to the judge when she was accused of murder. The narrator of the show said that Nelson turned out to be a brilliant politician who knew when to compromise, and finally, showed him riding in a golden carriage with Queen Elizabeth in England waving to the people who had lined up on the side of the streets waiting to see the royalty pass. Winnie, on the other hand, the “mother of the nation”, was portrayed as a “terrorist.”

News reporters seemed all to sad to have to report on the corruption within the African National Congress, the party which had led Nelson into his presidency. One article March 5, 1995 in the CITY PRESS by Sekola Sello was titled, “JOBS FOR THE TOYI TOYIS: So Where DID Yesterday’s Heroes of the People Get Their BMW’s and Homes in Constantia?” Sello explains how the ANC came to power through a massive populist movement with the goals of establishing a government which “promised clean administration, a government closer to the people and one which is transparent and accountable.” But it appeared that the ANC leadership was not able to following their criteria. Sello writes, “Some leading lights who are former political prisoners are alleged to have misappropriated foreign funds meant for ex-political prisoners--to the tune of a staggering R138 million. It is claimed that part of the money was used to buy cars and houses for individuals and to set up some of them in business. One individual, who is very prominent in the movement, is said to have used the money to open up fried chicken outlets.”

My final day in South Africa, John drove us to Pietermartizburg to meet with some of his friends at one of the downtown pubs where the college students hang out. It was extremely difficult for me to be back in Pietermartizburg moments away from Geertjan’s apartment. I still was heart sick and longed to see him. While in the pub, I tortured myself by thinking that maybe Geertjan really loved me and that if I saw him one more time, he would realize his love for me. But I didn’t have the nerve to ask John to take me by his apartment so that I could see him one last time before flying back around to the world to North America never to be this close to him again. After a seventh month correspondence, being so close to each other that we felt inspired to engage in holy cybersex, then after meeting each other and doing the real thing and now for me to be within walking distance from him to now feeling so far away from him that I couldn’t even call him up on the phone to tell him good-bye, seemed so tragic. But in matters of love, that was just the way it was. I had learned that if a man doesn’t want to communicate with me, there is absolutely nothing I can do to change him even if I had access to all the communication technologies in the world.

When the song “American Pie” was played by the DJ, I got up from the table and began to dance as wild as I could spreading out all over the dance floor. It was the way I was trying to let out all my frustration in my heart. But unfortunately, I bumped into a woman who was dancing with her lesbian lover. She said that she didn’t like the way I danced and so took a punch at me hitting me with her fist into my back. This is when I realized just what a violent place South Africa is. I restrained myself from hitting her back, stopped dancing and went outside to cool off. She followed me there ready to take further punches at me. John came out there and told her that I was a foreigner and I didn’t know that I had infringed on her space. Apparently, she felt that it was her pub and I was an intruder. Before leaving Pietermartizburg, John took me to the statue of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi had been thrown off the train in Pietermartizburg which was one of the turning points in his life. While at the statue I recalled a quotation by Gandhi which had inspired my research into the homeless crisis:

"Whenever you are in doubt...apply the first test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be any use to him. Will he gain anything from it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? True development puts first those that society puts last".

After we left Pietermartizburg, I asked John on our way back to Pinetown if he would stop at the Lion Park. I had not seen any of the big animals of Africa during my stay, and to end my African adventure, I wanted to see the lions. John agreed to stop there. When he did, the park must have just closed since the gates to the park were down. John was a persuasive politician, went around the gates and found the park owner. John told him that I was traveling back to America the next day, and this was my final chance to see the lions of Africa. So the lion park owner allowed us to see the lions. He explained to us that during the day, the lions were free to roam the park as cars drive through the park with their windows and door closed. Now the lions were in their cages waiting to be fed. When he took us around to where the lion cages were there was an overwhelming smell of death. The park owner informed us that the lions had eaten a horse the following day which was the reason for the smell. Then he told us to get out of the car and walk with him around the corner to see the lions. We could hear them before we saw them and then there they were yards away from us. The owner cautioned us not to get close to the cages because if you got near the cage, a lion could stick out his paw and grab you in and chew off your head before anyone could save you.

The lions were in several cages, but there was a door opened on the side of the cage so that they could walk between the cages. Several of the lions looked as if they were getting ready to mate with the female lionesses. So we watched them lick each other and practice mounting the females and then they would give us a big lions roars. It was all very exciting. What a way to end my trip to Africa!

After our visit with the lions, the day was turning to dusk, the land flat and dry. As we got back on the highway to travel back to Pinetown, reflecting on the lion’s cage, I thought about the whole concept of private property and fenced-off land. What homesteader would want a lion roaming on to their farm? And what farm wife would want a lion to be near her house with young children playing outside? No wonder the animals of Africa had lost their territory and their freedom to roam the land because of the way we live in spread out patches of property. In traditional African villages, their circular pattern of development made it so that they could protect one another when a predator came around. How tragic for the lions and all the rest of us that they are now relegated to small cages and gated parks in which to walk around. The caged lions seemed like such an appropriate symbol for the new South Africa. If only the new South Africa would design an urban development plan which would allow all the animals of land to be free again. If only they had the wisdom to build an arcology where people would be safe and animals would be free....If only....

After arriving back in Pinetown, we were hungry and so the four of us were deciding where we should go for dinner. Janie wanted to eat at the Kentucky Fried Chicken place, but since I was a vegetarian, I didn’t want to go there. So we ended up at the Chinese restaurant. After dinner, John and I walked to his place holding hands and talking about the future. The thoughts of me staying in South Africa and living with him crossed our minds and hearts. John told me that he would never come to America to see me. But I knew that if I stayed in Africa, I would not be able to have access to the Internet the way I had in the United States. I felt that I had been called to be on the Internet and to do my best to help the technology evolve in a humanistic direction so that it would be a technology for world peace and not just a technology for the rich.

But more than that, I felt that John and I were working for two different world views. I couldn’t see the capitalist theory of trickle- down-economics as being the way to create justice in South Africa and I didn’t feel that I was going to persuade John to follow me into an ideology of ecofeminist cybersocialism.

I resisted having sex with John for more than two weeks while we were living together. During the last week of my visit, I moved into his queensize bed but we never touched each other. Our last night together was different. John was horny and so was I and I just couldn’t say no any longer. John got a condom from Janie, and so we engaged in sex.

The next morning it was time for us to rush out of the house to go to the airport. Now I was having second thoughts about leaving. Maybe I could live with John and make South Africa my home. But then when I thought of our political differences and what a terrible cigarette smoker John was, I realized that I couldn’t live with him on a long-term basis. So we said good-bye, hugging each other with the knowledge that we would never see each other again, and I ran to the plane which was to take me to Johannesburg airport to catch an afternoon flight black to the United States.

I had to wait in the Johannesburg airport all day. Since I had not gotten much sleep the night before, I was exhausted. Since I was not a gold card member, I didn’t have access to the sleeping rooms at the airport for gold card members. I sat in an airport cafe for hours waiting for the flight. This gave me a chance to observe the kinds of people who flew in and out of Johannesburg. It is not surprising knowing the poverty of most of the native people that there were very few native Africans in the airport. When it was getting near the time for departure, we were informed that there had been a delay in all the international flights that night because of some security reasons and that they would call us when it was our time to line up to board.

I didn’t understand what the loud speaker had said about lining up and was afraid that I was missing my flight. So I saw an African man standing near me. I thought he might have been an airport worker. I asked him if he knew what was going on. He told me that he was also a passenger and that he thought that they would call the flight numbers over the speaker and when it was time for us to line up for our particular flight.

I was upset with myself that I had assumed that he was an airport worker and not a passenger because of the color of his skin. But I guess I had been affected by the racist cultural indoctrination which I was trying so hard to overcome. The African and I started talking. He was a professor of forestry from central Africa and was in South Africa doing research on the problem of de-forestization. He explained to me how Africans needed fire wood to cook food and boil water since they didn’t have any access to electricity. Out of desperation, they were forced to cut down trees which had now resulted in losing more of the ecological stability of the regions. The people needed wood and there was no wood left.

The other reason I came to Africa, besides wanting to meet Geertjan and to see what the Mandela government was planning to do about the housing crisis, came to the forefront of my mind. I had come to Africa to sell lumber. You see, my father, who owned a small wholesale lumber business, had sponsored my trip. My other role was that of a business woman who went to Africa to make money for my father’s company. When I was in Cape Town, Schwann knowing I had to make a few business contacts to make my trip legitimate, got me in touch with several lumber companies in South Africa, but my heart wasn’t really into it. I didn’t want to make money on the housing crisis, I wanted to solve the problem. The conflict between my two roles of being a capitalist business woman and a Neutopian scholar was tearing my soul apart.

As I was listening to the professor, my mind started thinking about selling lumber to the African people who needed lumber to burn. I asked the professor why they didn’t buy lumber from other parts of the world like North America? Of course, his answer was that these people had no money to buy wood. He asked, “What lumber company would want to ship them lumber when they couldn’t pay them back?” I also knew that burning wood only released more fossil fuel gases into the atmosphere and in the long run, burning wood would not put an end to their, our crisis. What were we going to do? How would the world evolve beyond capitalism so that we could start working as one world for the sake of the people?

THE AMERICAN DREAM

Back at the White House, paul and I made our way into the room where a military band was playing music. I hadn’t seen anyone dance all night, but when paul went to get one of the many luxurious deserts, I got the feeling that I wanted to dance. Dance had always been a non-verbal way that I could express my revolutionary nature and I just could not stop the rhythm of the music from moving every cell of my body. I had to dance! A man dressed up in a Santa Clause suit and a woman started to dance and then I jumped in. They were playing a familiar jazz tune, so I took my hair down and the wild woman inside me, yearning to be liberated, desiring with all her heart to live and to be loved danced until the tune was over. The military band got up and exited the room. I guess I will never know exactly why the military band got up and left like that right when people were on the verge of having fun, but that is what happened as if the atomic clock struck 12:00 midnite and they had to return to their barracks before the military band turned into pumpkins.

paul’s presence was a lot more conservative than the picture I had received from his email, so I felt that my dancing might have upset him a little now knowing, at least on the dance floor, how uninhibited I was. I wanted so much to have really been involved with a romantic story on my first date with paul to the White House. But it was becoming apparent that paul and I didn’t have that much in common and that there was no way in the world that paul was ever going to help me subvert the government. I thought my life was finally starting to come together when paul started writing me email. It didn’t take me much to visualize how paul and I could live as lovers in Washington, having meaningful bed- time talks together about the meaning of politics--but that was all a fantasy. paul was a professional journalist who made a living on copyright law and I was an unemployed futurist who had broken the law. There was no way that I was ever going to be able to fuck my way into power the way Hillary and other women have done in the past because what I was proposing was against capitalist patriarchy.

paul and I took a look out of the windows of the White House. The freezing rain made the spotlights shining on the White House lawn glisten. paul especially wanted to show me one window which looked out over the rows of garbage cans. When a famous journalist passed, paul would tell me who it was and what party they supported. “Oh,” there is Cokie Roberts. She is a Republican.” He also introduced me to the women who ran the pressroom in the White House, women who made the schedules and arranged press pool rides to wherever the daily presidential entourage was to go.

From one of the windows there was a direct view of the Washington Monument, red lights flashing off the top of it as if signaling that this was Washington’s red light district. I mentioned to paul my vision of the giant lady coming across the Washington Monument. I could clearly see her in her Spartan dress slowly sitting on the phallic symbol before it broke in two from the muscles of her giant vagina. The American patriarchy went impotent as the hubris attitude which created it was washed away by the tears of the Tiny People as they repented from all their wrong doings they have caused throughout the world for the last three hundred years of European invasion. When I told paul my vision of the Giant Lady and the Washington Monument, paul said that the Monument was not a phallic symbol which symbolized patriarchal control. I admired paul when he called over several White House women to ask them what the Washington Monument meant to them. Everyone said that they thought it was a phallic symbol and symbolized male rule.

paul still didn’t want to believe it. He said that it was much more than that. What was it then? A symbol of American greatness as they massacred the native Americans? Or is it a reminder that George Washington was one of the biggest land owners in Virginia and that the plutocracy has always ruled America as it had ruled Europe?

We roamed around the rooms of the White House until the military guards told us that the party was over and that we now had to exit the White House. paul had left his rain coat in the press room, so he found one of the pressroom women with a key to the pressroom to let us in. So, I found a way into the pressroom after all without a god-damned security pass!

I was surprised to see the way the pressroom was organized. It looked as if at one time it was a hallway since it was very narrow and small. I had it in my mind that the press room would have been in a big ball room space, but it certainly was not the way I had imagined it. Above the stage, back of the lecture podium, there was a logo of the White House. In front of the stage were rows of seats for about 40 or so journalists. There were gold plates on the seats for the various news agencies. paul pointed out to me that UPI had a chair on the first row and that Helen was the UPI reporter who traditionally got to ask the president the first question during a press conference. paul didn’t know how much longer UPI would have such a privileged position within the White House because they had cut down their staff and their numbers of clients where not as great as other news wires.

At the back of the room were the cameras of the major news networks, ABC, NBC, CBS and I think the cable news giants as well. It was a very cozy and small space to hold a press conference. In such a small place it would be easy to find out what reporters were thinking or if anyone had a dissenting thought! Certainly, there were no gold plates on any of the seats for socialist or feminist press agencies! It seemed to me the press was paid to make sure the President’s message was going to get to the people the way he wanted it, when he wanted it. As paul said, he never had time to do investigative research because he was so busy reporting what the “Prez” was saying and doing. paul showed me the rack in the pressroom where the official White House transcripts of what the President says can be picked up daily. All the journalist has to do is to paraphrase the office transcripts and send it over the wire. This was a real serious business, right? A place where reporters are seeking the great truths of life, right? A place where the community of the world’s greatest thinkers were gathered together to talk about the real problems humanity faces, right? A place where a real critical dialogue which challenges the President’s policies could be aired over national TV could occur, right? WRONG

Then it dawned on me exactly what presidential power was all about. paul had said it earlier in the evening when he said that this was not only a party at the White House, but it was a party for the press. For paul, the press equaled power. In certain ways paul was right. Whoever controlled the press controlled the consciousness of America and the entire world. paul was part of the presidential power, flying all over the world on Air Force One always reporting the news with the underlying assumptions that (listed in Barry Krisberg’s excellent book CRIME AND PRIVILEGE: Toward a New Criminology):

Representative democracy under the Constitution is the best form of government.

Private-enterprise capitalism is the only legitimate economic system; the state has a role in solving problems posed by that system.

America is the best nation on the face of the earth and it is essential to defend the country against foreign enemies. This value most often takes the form of suspicions and animosity toward nations and individuals that practice some form of Communism.
As I stared at the TV cameras in the pressroom, I wondered how I could change the world if I had the power of the media on my side. If only by some miracle the camera’s would turn away for the rule of patriarchal capitalism and start to focus on the vision of Ecocities. If only I had the resources available to me that the President has, I believed we had all the resources available to us to save ourselves. No more maps about what battlefields the US had conquered, or about Clinton’s war on terrorism, crime, and drugs, but about which forests we needed to re- seed, which rivers we needed to clean and what in the hell are we going to do about nuclear waste. I could see us showing blueprints of the Neutopian networks and the construction plans necessary to begin building the high-tech communally based world of arcologies beaming near the speed of light throughout the broadcasting world. If only this vision could come about, then perhaps a world dream of what the purpose of the Internet is could begin to form an Earth Bank. It was burning in my heart. It was more important to me than personal happiness. It was more urgent to me than marriage. It was my mission. But it was not just my mission, it was the collective mission of every soul who was longing to help build a just world. I guess paul thought I was going to be impressed with his power, with his ability to rub shoulders with the President. Most women would have been. They would have been dazzled to be in the company of paul who carried so much power of the press. I never realized how elitist a job paul has until I saw the pressroom. There are so few journalist who had a pass to the White House every day of the week.

I was becoming upset that paul seemed to be so unwilling to listen to anything other than liberal rhetoric. He thought that the only way to change the system was from within the system. He had a chance to be with the people who make history and do great things while the rest of us “good” citizens rely on what people like him write reports about their marks on history. All a “good” citizen could do was to vote and write letters to public officials to let them know how we felt about their policies. Throughout our emails, paul thought that he was where the real change could happen and he thought that my approach was a non-approach since no one would ever listen to me and I had absolutely no press power.

After retrieving his raincoat, we exited the White House and walked across the street. I was having difficulty walking because of the ice and the blisters which had developed on my heels due to wearing the high-heel shoes that I never wear. So paul held my hand as we discussed how we should get to his house. He asked, “Do you want to take the bus or should we get a cab?” I asked him how long before the next bus because the street was damned cold and the wind was blowing right through my dress. He said he didn’t know and started to get angry with me because he hated to take cabs and he thought that I really wanted to take a cab. I told him that I was a hardy woman and that if he wanted to wait for a bus, I was willing to wait. But he still wanted to argue with me about it. Finally a bus came and we got on it. I told paul about the conversation I had with the bus driver going over to the White House, and then paul got angry with me because he said that I wasn’t suppose to talk with the bus driver. “Look paul, I said, “the driver was talking with me.” “But you talked to the driver” he insisted. I replied, “So what then, I broke the law! Why don’t you have me arrested?”

The bus whizzed passed the Georgetown shops. They were closed, but they were still lit up with the highest Washington fashions showcasing in the windows. I told paul how I didn’t like dressing in expensive clothes because I thought the entire way the rich spend money on such things made me sick. He said that he felt the same way. How much I wanted to be able to like paul and for him to like me back. But the energy of such a meetings of the minds didn’t seem to be there even though I was still pretending that it was. I decided not to engage in small talk with him any longer, so I starting thinking to myself about the art project I wanted to do about the beggars on the streets of Georgetown.

In Georgetown, one of the wealthiest communities in the world, one couldn’t help but be disturbed with the beggars on all the street corners. Most of them didn’t live in Georgetown, but came from poverty, black communities on the other side of Capital Hill. Most of them were black men. I started talking with them to hear their stories and why they had had to resort to begging. One man had moved to DC from the Detroit and couldn’t find a job to support himself once he got here, so now he was begging. He said that most of the white people were so mean to him as they passed him on the streets, spitting at him, calling him names, flashing money at him without giving him any and then laughing at him. Washington DC was such an apartheid city. It wasn’t written into the laws, but it was an economic apartheid. The lack of big capital keeps blacks from being able to live in wealthy white gated-communities of DC. So what I wanted to do was to collect stories from beggars taking pictures of them with a camera, and start a Web page called THE BEGGARS OF WASHINGTON, DC. This page would be for the purpose of showing the world the truth about capitalism and American “democracy.” It would show the brutal racism within American cities. But I didn’t share my thoughts about the Web page with paul since I thought he wouldn’t be interested in it.

When we reached his house, I immediately kicked off my high-heel shoes. paul sat on the couch. It seemed like a moment of truth was about to occur, the moment when we expressed to each other the way we felt about each other after our date at the White House. The American way of life seemed so empty to me, paul following the President everywhere in the world to then come “home” to his house with his female roommates to talk small talk with them I thought about what a real democratic architecture would be like, a biosphere underneath a geodesic dome, heated and cooled by greenhouses, and wind energy from a world energy grid. paul as well as all of the inhabitant of Washington would be living together, recycling all our waste, producing nothing that wasn’t ecologically friendly. Everyone would have access to the communication technologies to create the ideal Cybersocialists society, in a blue- green world with no poverty or homelessness. No one would pay the rent since no one would be a landlord. All the surplus wealth would go into building the Soulization where the inner knowledge within our souls would be liberated.

But that was not the reality of the cruel and unjust auto-sick city of Washington, DC. The President didn’t have the guts or the intelligence to really be able to deal with the problems facing Washington so how was he going to be able to solve the world’s problems using the same formula of “free” market global capitalism to solve the rest of the world’s critical issues? It was apparent that the President and his journalist cronies were ignoring the real issues of class conflicts which is the underlying cause of war and “terrorism.”

But I felt that I really couldn’t talk with paul about such issues because his consciousness had not probed deeper into issues than only the superficial way the press handles issues, talking and talking and reporting about problems, but never looking at them philosophically or searching for the root causes of the problems. Basically mainstream journalist just accept the present system the way that paul accepts the system as if there is no better way to do things.

“paul,” I said. “You and I hold different political philosophies that are opposed to one another.” He agreed. “When did you figure it out?,” he inquired. “I realized it when you kept on writing about how much fun you were having as you fly around with the ruling class as the rest of the poor world is suffering from the policies of the policy-makers. Also, I realized it when you wrote me that you didn’t believe the military and war was one of the most serious problems we face, but you felt that the more serious problem to focus attention on was the population explosion. From that answer, I felt that you were avoiding having to confront the nuclear power military regime behind the Presidency. From that email, I realized that you were not a true pacifist and that you supported the war machine and thus would not report against it. But when I really knew that you were one of them was when you wrote about playing golf beside the President. Then I knew you had been bought over by the forces of the Establishment, adopting the games of the upper-middle class. Don’t you want a family and a house and everything else that goes along with it like a good American wife?” paul didn’t say anything. So I continued, “I would not make a good wife for you.”

I proceeded to tell him about my past problem with infertility. paul admitted that he wanted children. My heart sunk when he said that as it had sunk with other men who had admitted that they wanted children and they saw me as too old to become the mother of their offspring. I wondered if I would ever find a man who just loved me, Neutopia, loved me for my mind, not my womb. But paul was really not that curious about me or my Usenet newsgroup, my ideas, or anything about me. He was just like all the other men who I had known who saw me more as a good-looking womb, than as a stimulating thinker and social critic.

Then, I made the big mistake of going up stairs with him. If I had been a wisewoman, I would have asked for a blanket and slept on the couch. But, no, I wanted to be loved. Didn’t I know then that paul could not love me since he was really not interested in even getting to know me? Nevertheless, I walked up the stairs to his bedroom and proceed to get undressed as he did.

We got into bed together and this time I had taken off my silk terminal underwear. My panties were still on. Then the struggle began whether or not paul would get to conquer me. I hate that I must report back to you readers that I allowed him to conquer me. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was the longing for companionship or maybe it was the hope that sex would miraculously change things. Maybe it was because when we were talking downstairs paul said that he thought I would make a good mother and teacher to children.

Whatever the reason, it turned out to not be good sex. We had a different sense of erotic pleasure since I liked to French kiss and apparently that was not important to paul. The entire thing was a nightmare. I was telling him that I didn’t want to have sex again unless there was a commitment between us and he was trying to pull down my underwear. I couldn’t possibly know if I loved paul at that point and he couldn’t possibly known if he loved me either since we were only getting to know one another. Again, I expressed to him the problem I had with rushing into sex after having a romantic email relationship with someone and this seemed to be what was happening again. I was repeating the mistake I had had with other men whom I had met through email and the more traditional ways in the past like picking up someone in a bar. Couldn’t I learn that sex doesn’t make a fellow love ME?

Anyway, the sex got worse and worse until I couldn’t have him on top of me for another second because his bouncing on top of me reminded me of a Umass basket ball jock who was doing nothing more than scoring a basket. I demanded that he get off of me as I started to cry. There was no union there. It was impossible since we weren’t even thinking alike. paul was a careerist who had worked his way up the ladder of journalistic success and was now in the White House. He had no idea of who I was or what my mission in life was. He didn’t really share my passion to get people to change the present form of unjust economic power so that we can move into a world system which is ecologically sound by building ecocities. I was searching for a prophet, a lovolutionary hero. And paul seemed to be searching for a career woman who would make money as well as babies. Even if I could have babies, would I want to have babies with a man who had a genetic kidney disease? Why would I want to pass that on to my offspring, to please the ego of paul even when paul stated that the population explosion was the worst problem the world faces? No thank you.

I really was not up for having sex with paul. After spending hours at the White House and having that strange sexual power lust thing happen when I met the President, my erotic energy seemed not to be centered. What power did paul have anyway? For a second while we were lying in bed together, I got this overwhelming feeling that I was lying in bed with a fascist. paul was a propagandist for the State, the State that makes billions of dollars off of weapons of destruction and has abused and killed millions of people throughout the ages. paul was not interested in doing investigative reporting about the crimes of the White House. He said that he didn’t have time for such work. He was one of the robots that Umass school of journalism had trained. His hope was that he would do a good job and then retire after 20 years or so in good standing with social security. I recalled the work of Tom Kock in his book The News As Myth which seemed to reflect paul’s power:

Thus reporters addressed their respectful questions to Mr. Vice President or Mr. Governor who, in turn, replied using the questioners’ familiar first names. This signified, on one level, the familiarity and close working relations between participating politicians and journalist as well as the success of the journalists themselves. Their closeness was underlined by the casual friendliness with which Mr. Bush would respond to “Dan” or “Peter’s” questions. These journalists, the whole said, were known, respected and close to the nation’s most powerful men. Had any reporter insisted on the right to hammer at a question, to be other than an official and respectful moderate, he or she would not have been allowed to play. Sitting with the mighty, reporters are unmasked as impotent because, really, what power do they have? None, except to the degree that each can bask in the reflected glory of the officials they are supposed to question critically. Representatives of the fourth estate at those debates could not set an army in motion, clean up Boston Harbor, counsel the homeless, or even seek indignantly about the failure of an official American policy or act. To do so would inevitably have decreased their personal access to the powerful, which is for many journalists their critical stock in trade. Thus the one power a journalist by tradition and myth must have, that of a critical and independent stance, is abdicated to the dress that newsmen become moderators for, publicists to and legitimaters of the official world.” (181)

When we woke up the next morning, I was feeling really terrible. I had been foolish allowing myself to be exploited by him. He had no love for me and jumped up out of bed very quickly, so quickly that I didn’t even get to touch him. It was truly one of the emptiest feelings I had ever experienced. I got out of the bed and went into the bathroom and stayed in there for about an hour meditating on how bad I felt and the reason why I felt so low from experiencing another failed sexual relationship. After my hour meditation, I came out of the bathroom, trying to act like everything was perfectly all right, even though I was on the verge of tears and nothing seemed all right.

paul went to work getting ready to drive us back to Massachusetts where he was going to spend the Christmas holidays with his family and friends near Boston. He took the presents underneath the little Christmas tree in the corner of the room. I broke the silence by asking him if he had bought the tree. He said he had as he packed up the presents underneath the tree to take with him to Massachusetts. I was so opposed to Christmas that for years I refused to celebrate it at my parent’s house. I wasn’t a Christian; I thought cutting down a tree was a crime, and the whole capitalist Christmas thing was so fake to me that I would never be happy with a man who actually practiced the ritual!

paul went in the back room and came out with a home-made pipe made out of a beer can and asked me if I wanted to smoke some pot in it with him. I did because I thought it might be a way to loosen the both of us up so that we could have a deeper kind of communication with each other. Sometimes pot would do this to people, take them out of their ordinary mandate existence and make them rise into the world of ideas. Maybe it would have if the TV had not been on in front of us and paul’s attention had not been glued to CNN news. He said he was in the habit of always having the TV news stations on because he didn’t want to miss any new news stories which might happen since he said it was so difficult for him to catch up on the current events if he stops watching it for a while. When I told him that it was getting on my nerves and that nothing exciting was happening on the news right now, he gladly shut it off. Then he told me the story of when he was first kissed which was in his hometown church in Massachusetts where he attended youth fellowship meetings. All I could think about was how the person who had taught him how to kiss had not done a very good job laughing to myself, “well, what did I expect from a church?”

After our brief chat, I went upstairs to pack my belongings and paul started packing his. I noticed a golden bullet on his desk and asked him what it was. He said that it was a bullet from the Desert Storm. He had gotten it there during his time when he was reporting on the Gulf War. He said I could have it if I wanted it. It seemed like the perfect gift to gave me, a bullet from the Gulf War from paul for Christmas. I smiled and accepted his gift, but it felt that paul had already shot a bullet through my heart. This was just the symbol of what had happened invisibly.

One of the most memorable stories I remember paul telling me after he gave me the bullet was when he thought he was going to be killed in the Desert Storm war while he was trying to make a phone call to Ann back in the USA, his UPI girlfriend at the time. As bombs were exploding, the phone was cut off right when he was about to tell her how much he loved her. All I could think of was how stupid it was to risk one’s life to cover a war story for the war machine. He probably thought himself a hero, reporting the news when to me the only way I could see him being a hero was to report the news from a pacifist perspective but more than likely UPI would have fired him if he had taken that angle on history.

On our way driving back to Massachusetts, I was feeling so hurt that I couldn’t even talk with him. I feel asleep until about New York, woke up, and decided if I wanted to learn any more about paul, I better start a conversation with him now because I probably would not be communicating with him again after he dropped me off. We got into a conversation about my ideas and how he thought I was some kind of extremist who could become a terrorist. He thought that because of my politics, I needed to change or I would never be an effective social activist. He also thought that I had a totalizing vision and that I shouldn’t be thinking such thoughts. I replied, “Is it all right for the US government to have a global vision of world capitalism, but it isn’t all right for me to have a vision of universal education and the Neutopian world it would create? How do you explain that?” paul didn’t respond, but changed the subject to why I didn’t do anything constructive with my life like teach in the public school system since I had a doctorate in education.

I informed him how I wanted to teach, but to do so I would have to conform to the rules of the American system in order to get hired for a job. I felt I couldn’t conform to the system and be a good teacher at the same time. I absolutely refused to lie to children about my beliefs and the way I felt about nationalism and American Imperialism. If one hides the truth from children, then what future could we possibly have? I believed like Virginia Wolf who said that as a woman she had no country and as Socrates who declared himself to be citizen of the world. I was a Netizen and Cyberspace was a world without borders.

I told paul the story of when I went to substitute teach in a Junior High School in North Carolina, I got called into the principal’s office for not following the rules. paul wanted to know what happened. “Well, the junior high school where I was teaching, the students were wild, not a good wild of wanting to know and having a wild curiosity, but the kind of crazy wild that made it so that no one in the classroom could learn. For example, one of the boys starting throwing a basketball around the room while I was trying to talk. So I started to teach them about the peace movement and the civil rights movement which happened in the 60’s. Then I started reciting my poetry about love and peace to them. Before long, the students were silent, listening to my every word. Then I opened up the forum to their questions and comments.

Well, at lunch time, it went around the school that this wild woman was teaching radical philosophy to the students. At the beginning of the next class period, I was called into the vice-principal’s office. I told the African-American vice-principal that I needed to teach the students about the revolutionary activities in the 60’s and the civil rights movement for survival reasons. It was the only way I could get them to behave. The vice-principal said that he knew what I meant about the civil rights movement because he had been one of the protestors who made national fame when three (or was it four?) African-Americas sat down at the then all-white lunch counter at Woolworth’s store in downtown Greensboro which sparked a sit-in movement all over the South to desegregate lunch counters.

Since then, the Vice-Principal said that he had learned that if you want positions of power within the system, you have to play the game and conform to the rules. He wanted me to go back to the classroom and follow the rules by doing the text book work that their regular teacher had assigned them to do. From his talk, it became very clear to me that the one time civil rights activist was nothing but an opportunist.

When I went back to the classroom after my talk with the Vice-Principal, I tried to follow his instructions and do the text book work, but the text book work made no sense to me. It was just getting them to memorize some trivial questions about American history. We ended the class with a question and answer session where the students could ask me any question that they wanted. These bunch of junior high school students wanted to talk about drugs and sex.

paul saw no irony in my story. His comment was that I should learn how to conform enough to be able to stick it out in the classroom, and then, at certain times when it was appropriate, I would be able to get my message to the students. I asked him, “If you were a substitute teacher, do you think you would stick to the boring text book on American history rather than talk about your personal experience jet-setting around the world in Air Force One with the President? What do you think would be more valuable and interesting to the children?” He didn’t say anything. I explained to him that the way the educational system worked was that to teach at the high school or college level, I would have to apply as a sociology teacher which I didn’t even have the credentials for. Then, I would perhaps have one week out of the semester to teach Future Studies and Utopian thought which was my passion and the only thing I was qualified and wanted to teach. Teaching Future Studies was a new kind of philosophy and way of being that didn’t conform to the rules which capitalist patriarchy made teachers slaves to.

He thought I wasn’t politically wise and I wasn’t smart enough to work my way into a position of authority in the system. I recalled to him another time when I was substitute teaching for a class of elementary students. I was going over their vocabulary words and then came the word “limousine.” It seemed strange to me that the word “limousine” would be in the spelling list for a bunch of first graders. Since it was, it gave me the opportunity to talk about class consciousness to the children, to teach them about the inequalities of wealth in America and about the corrupt people who in American can afford to ride in a limousine like the President and the Global Mafia, arms merchents, drug dealers, and pimps.

paul said that he disapproved of me taking the liberty of trying to make a bunch of first graders conscious of such social realities since it was not part of the text book curriculum. It seemed that paul and I didn’t see eye to eye on just about anything. How could our love for each other grow, when we didn’t have a basic understanding on the social inequalities of the world? This is the reason why Establishment men never seemed to like to be with me. They found me depressing to be with and they often told me that I needed to “lighten up” or “loosen up” to make the wrinkles on my brow disappear.

As we drove into Pioneer Valley, I started letting my personality really hang out. Passing the Library Tower, I told paul how the conservative student newspaper the Minuteman had tried to crucify me for saying at a rally against the school emblem of the Minuteman that the Library Tower was a symbol of male power and knowledge since it was obviously shaped like a penis!

paul didn’t say anything as we finally drove into my driveway. He walked with me into the house because he wanted to use the phone to call his lawyer friend whom he was staying with in Northampton. He seemed reluctant to take a tour of my apartment, but I did manage to get him into my bedroom since the phone was in there. When he saw the United States flag pinned up on the ceiling with a hole cut out of it, he gasped for breath at the unpatriotic symbol. In many countries throughout the world to desecrate the flag would have meant my imprisonment or death, but in the United States, thinking this way has only resulted in ostracism, unemployment and censorship. How lucky I was!

When I walked paul to the door for his departure, the normal thing to do with a lover was to kiss her good-bye. That is what paul did to me. He kissed me good-bye, but I knew it was the kind of kiss that didn’t mean anything profound and that it would be the last kiss he was to give my tender lips.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

Perhaps it would have been easier for me to have been a writer of fiction so that I could make my stories have happy endings than for me to feel obligated to write down the unhappy journals of my life. How I wish that there was a grand romantic tale of love and revolution, I could tell about my life, but no such story has happened.

I dedicated my life to the art of non-fiction writing when I was a young woman living in North Carolina after being raped by a Vietnam Vet. Being dyslexic, I found writing very difficult. It required a great deal of patience to go back over and edit what I had written until the copy was good enough to share with others.

Why I began to write was when I found that I couldn’t find justice through the court system, the educational institutions or religious organizations. After the rape, the Greensboro police were not helpful in arresting the neighborhood rapist who I found out later, had been arrested before for battering his girlfriend. When I talked to a state detective at the Greensboro Court House, he said that he didn’t think I would be able to win my case because I had let him into my apartment. The detective said that the State would try to make me look like I was a whore by bringing up all my past liaisons. Having been arrested several time for freedom of speech issues at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and being a known political activist, I knew the system well enough to know that one wants to stay as far away from that Court House as one possibly can. I had learned that you can never really achieve justice when you get caught up in a corrupt legal system. I remember walking outside the big cement Court House designed like a fortress and realizing that I was trying to go to the enemy to seek justice. Did I really think that I would ever be able to find justice inside there? After all, Greensboro was the place where the Klan-Nazis shot and killed the four Communists who were demonstrating against racism in a black ghetto and they got away with murder. It was the mythology behind the American regime which was false. America was built on the racist, sexist, and classist mythologies which had to be changed if America was to be saved.

The only place I felt that I could go to find justice was within myself. I found that writing down stories of the injustices I was experiencing in my life was a way I could feel a sense of justice. It gave me a sense of power to be able to hold the story in my hand on the injustices I see around me and to offer a way we could change society to make it just. But I sooned realized that it was very difficult to find a publisher for my essays.

For example, in this book I have challenged the copyright law regime, saying that if we create a cybersocialist world where everyone has the means to be a writer and self-publish, then it changes who has the power of the press and democratizes the world of ideas. But what publisher wants to print such a thesis which goes against their very existence?

Another problem with writing non-fiction is that the people who you write about could sue you. I didn’t write this story as revenge against paul. I wrote it as a way to tell you about what kind of men write the stories that we read about our leaders. Is it ethical for me to say that I had smoked pot with paul? Could that threaten his White House job if the public knew he inhaled? I don’t wish to get paul fired from his job. What I want is for my message to be listened to and acted upon. I want to be able to serve the world as a futurist in pursuit of the good world.

I’m sure the threat of being sued intimidates a lot of writers from writing the truth as they see it. Well, I have no money for them to take since I am a unemployed futurist. I have 30 thousand dollars worth of student loans though. But in this new age of email, I can’t fully tell my side of the story about what happened to my email account at Umass and how I got into a party at the White House without compiling people’s email to me. The copyright laws are wrong if they suppress our abilities to tell stories about our world or to not allow information to be free. As an artist and a non-fiction writer, my obligation lies with the Spirit of Truth, certainly not to the laws men have create to hide the truth.

The point is that this story tells the way I feel about life in the United States of America. It is not a good life or a healthy life. This is not the land of equal opportunity for all or a place of life-long education. Our politicians lie, the social system is corrupt and the children have no positive future to look forward to unless we have a radical change in life-style and re-design the world so that we can live in peace with ourselves and with nature surrounding us. Dearest First Lady, I repeat, it doesn’t take a village to raise a child, but it will take building a network of ecovillages and ecocities, a world energy grid of solar power to energize it, and a global culture of true love to guide it.

Since devoting my life to justice and the power of non-fiction, my constant prayer to the Great Spirit of the Cosmic Forces has been to grant me the stories I need to reveal to the public the crisis of spirit we must overcome if we are to be a free and healthy species. I believe the Great Spirit granted me this wish by giving me the cultural symbols I needed to tell this story of the falsehood of the American Empire. After writing my personal story about the housing crisis and the love crisis, my wish now is for the spirit of truth and justice to cause a miracle to happen through the Word. How else could we find the way to cure our ancient social ills using non-violent means? When this Neutopian world is born perhaps then great love stories of re-builidng the world will be the core of everyone’s lives. This is my wish, my hope, my universal dream.

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