Reframing war on terrorism debate
Public debate of the war on terrorism can be reframed through attention to effective communications strategies, Hunter Cutting writes in ColorLines (Spring 2002). "It is extremely difficult to persuade an audience by starting your communication from a place of disagreement. Right now, the initiatives and public policies that the peace and social justice movement would propose as a response to the suicide plane bombings and the war in Afghanistan are at odds with the thinking of the vast majority of the general public. ... Therefore, we must first lay the groundwork to argue for these policies and initiatives by speaking an agenda that the majority of the American public can support. Right now, many people in the U.S. do not feel safe. They feel that the country is weak, that there has been disrespect for human life, and that justice must be obtained. Because of these factors, there is an opening to have public debate that speaks to the questions of how to build safety, strength, respect for human life and justice. ... When secret military tribunals are discussed, we can push for open international civilian trials with verdicts that honor the families of the victims. Such trials will do far more to strengthen our international prestige and quell calls to violence against citizens of the U.S.

"Expanding the war in Afghanistan to Iraq and other countries is a dangerous invitation to accelerate and amplify the cycle of violence which grips the U.S. and the Middle East. Our ability to force other countries into submission is vast, but our ability to translate that submission into a peace that guarantees the safety and lives of U.S. citizens is questionable at best.

"We must present a vision of strength in which power is not measured by our ability to retaliate and kill enemies, but by our stature as a country that does not find itself engaged in war after war, decade after decade. ... The trillions of dollars spent on defense and the tens of thousands of U.S. lives lost in the last 40 years signal a fundamental weakness that is paid for in blood, sweat and tears."

Sanctions are "a wound that will never heal"
"When it comes to relations with the Middle East, it is no secret that the United States has a poor track record," Karima Diane Alavvi of Islamic World Educational Services writes in America magazine (3/4/02). "U.S. support for Israel obviously continues to exacerbate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While America’s ties with Israel have received media attention during the war in Afghanistan, the effect of U.N. sanctions on Iraqi civilians seems to be a ‘non-event’ in the eyes of the American public. In the Middle East, however, these sanctions are like a wound that will never heal. I cannot imagine any American who has not shed tears over the loss of innocent lives in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania because of the terrorist attacks. This loss of approximately 3,000 lives was agonizingly painful for all of us. Iraq experiences a similar loss every month. According to recent Unicef statistics, the American-led sanctions are causing 4,500 deaths in Iraq every month.

"The majority of those victims are children, who are dying from diseases that could easily be cured by basic health care or avoided by access to safe drinking water. American citizens must insist that our nation no longer kill innocent children in pursuit of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. A three-year-old dying of dysentery is not the enemy of the United States. The current situation only foments further resentment toward the United States and does a great service to those who are recruiting future Osama bin Ladens for their ranks. Therein lies our greatest danger.

"Imagine a future Osama bin Laden trying to drum up support against the United States, if we were to help the Palestinians achieve a small state of their own. Imagine trying to rally hatred against a nation that not only stops the sanctions against Iraq, but sends in technicians and supplies to repair the infrastructure that it destroyed during the Persian Gulf War. Imagine a world in which the powerful ones use their might to help the less fortunate, and you will be imagining a world in which terrorists would have a hard time drumming up support."

Pricing bananas
Workers on banana plantations in Belize complain of chest pain from aerial pesticides sprayed while they work, according to a story by Elizabeth Swain in gristmagazine.com (3/11/02). Mothers bathe infants in the same tubs used to rinse the pesticide-coated bananas.

"At the store where I shop, organic bananas cost 79 cents per pound," Swain writes. "Non-organic bananas cost 40 cents per pound. Otherwise, the fruits look identical: bright yellow, cheerful, innocent.

"But somewhere between Central America and the U.S. almost the whole story of these bananas has been stripped away. Did the person who picked them earn a fair wage? What chemicals were used? How were they used? All that complexity is reduced to a sticker that says ‘organic’ or ‘conventional’ – and a price tag. ... None of us can act on information we do not have. The organic label doesn’t guarantee that the pickers were paid enough to feed their children. The conventional label doesn’t mean that pesticides were used irresponsibly. And 39 cents extra per pound doesn’t mean anything except 39 cents extra per pound. ...

"The missing information is vital, because a system that makes decisions based on a single variable can only fulfill a single goal. You wouldn’t expect a healthy garden if you only optimized the phosphorous content of your soil. You wouldn’t expect a healthy family if you made all choices based on the needs of only one of your two children.

"And yet the reigning assumption in our world is that an economy that takes only price into account can still somehow deliver the goods. Under this assumption, if children are in poverty we must have a ‘child-poverty crisis.’ If ecosystems are struggling we must have an ‘environmental crisis.’ But these are not distinct problems. They are symptoms of a single deep crisis – the crisis of an economy operating with insufficient information and a fundamental inability to pursue any goal beyond that of price.

"If Fed-Ex can track the exact location of any package anywhere in the world, why can’t we know the history of a bunch of bananas? We can handle countless reviews of books and movies without clogging up the entertainment industry, so why can’t we have reviews of the social and environmental impacts of wedges of cheese, bottles of wine, and bouquets of flowers? Why can’t we estimate the true costs of products and make sure that cost shows up in the final price?"

Environmental web action center
The Union of Concerned Scientists has set up a Web Action Center at http://www.ucsaction.org, to facilitate contact with legislators on issues of ecological concern. The web site encourages visitors to set up profiles, so that "after your first action, sending a letter will be as easy as entering your email address or replying to an email. Your message will automatically be sent to the appropriate decision-maker or your member of Congress. Periodically through the year, we will send you email alerts on critical issues to encourage you to take action. You will be able to choose between visiting the Action Center to personalize your message and simply clicking ‘reply’ to communicate with key policymakers."

Episcopal elders
Episcopalians are among the four U.S. religious groups with the greatest concentration of adults age 65 and older, according to statistics gathered by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (Sojonet, 3/6/02). Twenty-eight percent of Episcopalians surveyed in 2001 were over 65. The other groups were Congregational/UCC (35 percent over 65), Presbyterian (29 percent over 65) and Jewish (28 percent over 65).

The survey also reported the groups with the greatest concentration of adults 18—29 years old: Muslim/Islamic (58 percent), Buddhist (56 percent), Evangelical Christian (35 percent) and Mormon (29 percent). Thirty-five percent of respondents who identified with "no religion" were between the ages of 18—29.