Thom Hartmann: The Hidden History of Guns and The Second Amendment
Progressive Talk show host, Thom Hartmann spoke at Town Hall Seattle about the Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment on June 23rd. Here is the full recording from the event.
Sankofa Impact: The Last Slave Ship to the United States
In May, the wreckage of the last slave ship to the United States was confirmed found off the shores of Mobile Alabama. Attorney, Justice, and Historian, Karlos Finley, explains the significance of the slaveship, Clotilda, for the descendants of those enslaved people transported here inside it in 1860. Finley also describes the remarkable community that many of the people who came on that ship created in Africa Town, Alabama. (more…)
Preteen and Teen Girls, Puberty and the Period
Are you, or someone you know navigating the preteen or the teen girl? Julie Metzger is a Pediatric Nurse and Founder of Great Conversations. Metzger has been providing programs on the topic of sex, puberty and growing up for over 30 years. She speaks with KBCS’s Yuko Kodama about what puberty brings to a girl’s life and the family.
Producer: Yuko Kodama
Image courtesy of Great Conversations – Photo taken by Losa Brooks
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91.3 KBCS, music and ideas. Listener supported radio from Bellevue College. Up next, a story on how to talk about puberty, sex, and the period with your young teen. This is Yuko Kodama with KBCS, with Julie Metzger, a pediatric nurse and founder of Great Conversations, which provides programs for families of teens and preteens about puberty, sex and growing up. What are some examples of stories that you’ve come across that really speak to how important the puberty even having the period, it really comes down to that in a lot of ways, right? This kind of expectation that “okay, at some point, I’m going to have a period. And what is that going to be like? And how scary is that?” Is there like a story that you could share around the potency of that for a young girl?
0:54
Maybe what we’re saying actually is, what is the foundational basis of how I build this curriculum and built this curriculum 31 years ago. Because I think part of it is, “what is the story that you need to tell?” The foundational idea is rewriting a story. There are a lot of adult women who walk in with a certain story around what a period means. There are words that are described very negatively, and they walk in sort of assuming a story. And they’re assuming the story, so much so that they’re assuming that we’re going to tell that story and that their daughters will learn that story and much of it is based on secrecy and shame and pain, and embarrassment and inconvenience. For me, from the very beginning, one of the whole goals here is to rewrite the narrative around that while still claiming the truth about a period. There are lots of things for instance, that are inconvenient about a period, they’re logistics. But I think looking at them more matter of factly, versus as if they’re a total pain and insurmountable, which is more the story that we’re told or that we continue to tell, even amongst each other because people, of course, don’t talk out loud about a period, which is its own problem, that we don’t talk out loud about periods, but even between ourselves as women, we tend to only tell a negative story. So at the most foundational place, my language and storytelling and description of puberty, of what it means, what it’s about, periods being only one part of that is a sort of rewriting of that narrative. 90% of my words are, I am talking directly to the girls in the room. Even though I’m talking to the girls, the people that walk out the most transformed are 100% the adults in the room. I can just see it in their faces, “I never thought about talking about it like this,” or they’ll walk out like “I haven’t laughed that hard in a year. That was like being at a comic stand up. I did not expect to cry or laugh.” There can be a story that doesn’t feel false, in fact, it feels so true that the adult people, dads, moms, are saying “I see it now that you’ve said it, I see it. And I’m excited about carrying that narrative forward.”
3:40
So it’s kind of like setting the table for the family to then be able to start talking about all of this in in a way that is more open, that is freeing,
3:53
And it isn’t shame, embarrassment, secret. You can still claim embarrassment while still lifting up. It’s what you’re learning out of that space. I have worked hard in these 31 years to surround the narrative that lifts up while also claiming the matter of fact truth of how to get a tampon in. It’s how you can look straight at what is truth, knowing that the culture, the narrative that all the adults have grown up within that room are that periods and most of puberty actually takes you away from what we are looking for in adult women. You get bigger, you have BO, you have pimples, you have greasy hair, you have leg hair, you have hair, you add fat to your body, and you bleed. I mean, there’s nothing about that that has been told in a way that lifts people up and yet how curious since none of the human beings on the planet would be here without the capacity of a woman’s body to be able to do the work to conceive and carry a baby and deliver, you’d think it would be the thing we would lift up most and honor. Puberty takes you away from what we admire in a beautiful woman and purity takes you toward what we look for in a man. So when you think of boys’ puberty, we lift up. “Oh, you’re getting bigger, your voice, your jaw, your muscles, your virility, your shape, your size, your manliness,” it’s a lifting up all the way along for boys puberty, and it is absolutely diminishing for what the story is, because we admire smaller women, not so messy, without hair, without BO. Those things don’t feel feminine. You know, we don’t think “oh, what’s the feminine ideal?” We don’t say, “well, for sure she’ll have BO.” It’s a curious and interesting thing, the weight that we carry, as women, around. Just think about it, that we have to remove all of our body hair to be attractive. It is just a amazing idea to think about.
6:29
What kind of experiences do you tend to see among people who come through?
6:34
One of the things that I can almost never get over and it’s so interesting, because it’s the narrative we’ve all bought into, iis when we had everyone an index card and give people two options. One is to ask any question. And the second option is write the thing you are most looking forward to in puberty and the thing you are least looking forward to in puberty. And we get, you know, 130 cards back and I read the most and the least out loud, very predictively. The girls are talking about things that are physical that we’ve already talked about, “I’m most looking forward to growing taller, I’m least looking forward to a period” would be the 80%. One of the interesting things is we’re also asking the adults in the room to do that same card and the most common thing that a grown up writes is that “they’re least looking forward to the moodiness of their daughter, or their mood swings.” They create a negative narrative around moods and emotions and I, I find myself so… I have an experience of sadness in that. That’s hard to describe, because I want to drop those cards down right in that moment, and this is, again, 31 years of this, it’s like, I want to look right in the eyes of those people who wrote that card and just help redirect their thinking about how important emotions are. How we need our girls to feel angry, how we need our girls to feel sad, how we want our kids to experience a wide range of emotions. That being emotions are about how we respond to the world. We need our girls to be not burying that, but actually learning and articulating that. Our task and challenge is how to articulate and show self control around how we act upon our emotions, but not that our girls are in any way, negative to the world by being moody. That is so powerful and visceral for me. I, I don’t even know what to do sometimes with that because I feel like sometimes those moms write that to be funny. Or they write it because that’s the story that they just assume. Or they actually do have real fear about emotions in their own home, because they can’t take it. I want to work on that. If it wasn’t for teenagers, the world would be a much less courageous place. If you think of so many extraordinary things that have happened because of teenagers. The Revolutionary war, most of the people who fought were teenagers. If you think of civil rights, most of the people who are brave enough to get onto a bus, to have the courage to sit at a lunch counter, where you’re not invited, requires real anger and real passion, and real sadness, and real emotion to be able to take that on and that’s the way the world improves and changes. If those same teenagers in Nashville and other places did not sit at that lunch counter, because they were afraid of showing their anger or their sadness, the world would not change. Young people who, because of their impulsivity, because of their passion, because of their sense of social justice because of their courage, that changes the world. That’s not an eye roll. That’s transformative.
10:21
That was Julie Metzger, a pediatric nurse and founder of Great Conversations which provides programs for families of teens and preteens about puberty, sex, and growing up.
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91.3 KBCS music and ideas, listener supported radio from Bellevue College.
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KBCS 91.3 FM online at KBCS.fm. The teen girl can be complex to navigate for some guys, but male caregivers can have an important role to play in a girl’s future relationships. Up next, KBCS’s Yuko Kodama interviews a veteran in this field, Julie Metzger, a pediatric nurse and founder of Great Conversations, a program for families of teens on puberty, sex, and growing up.
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You offer the Dads of Daughters class. So what is it about?
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I thought, “Oh it would be really fun to talk to dads more about – and kind of help them along on the journey.” There’s a freedom in the room. They feel like they can talk more safely, maybe without being judged or embarrassed themselves. The dads are fantastic! Sometimes there’s, you know, 150 dads and me in the room. It’s pretty magical. I say, “Well, I’m not a dad. But I do know a lot about girls.” I believe strongly, and I would do this in any talk about teens, I think there’s sort of a primary task of adolescence, physical, social, emotional, cognitive, and kind of talk through what’s our priority as a grown up parenting these girls. My job is to help people improve their conversations. Let’s take the physical aspects of girls development. I talk about puberty for girls how it’s both the same and different for boys. It’s a very short, very precise, kind of five to six year journey. Tends to start in early elementary school finish up, many, at the end of middle school, early High School, that’s very different than boys’ puberty. I talk about what that looks like. How puberty takes you away from what we idealize and I mean, that’s all kind of a wake up for dads to think about, because they have not had that experience themselves. But then I talk about how because of some of those things, and because our society is worried about obesity-and needs to be-it’s important to hear though that, as we parent girls through puberty, our job really is not to talk about weight gain or food or things where we’re judging and shaming girls for their growth because between the ages of 9 and 16 a girl’s going to gain 15 to 55 pounds and that’s not going to come perfectly and evenly with their height. Many girls get fuller, bigger, before they get taller and I think there are lots of dads who think “oh, my daughter’s getting unhealthy. She’s, maybe she’s going to be fat or obese.” They worry they judge they create shame around those things and so I invite dads into the truth about girls physical development and about how they can encourage, promote and lift up their daughter’s physical selves by sharing activities, supporting their passions in their physical activities, encouraging them in that way, and inviting great food into their lives without that additional shame around weight gain. You know you can take that down each of those aspects, emotional, social, cognitive. And emotional for sure. A rewrite of lots of parents, dads, all humans around negating girls emotional selves. Helping them respond to their daughter’s emotional communication in a way that acknowledges and invites them to see themselves as heard and understood. I mean the research is super evident that when girls see and know themselves to be heard and understood by grown ups, there are healthier outcomes, they reduce their risk behavior, they slow down in their initiation of sex. They tend to know what it means to create healthy relationships. And there’s all sorts of amazing studies about the particular significance of dads in that work.
3:18
That was Julie Metzger, pediatric nurse and founder of Great Conversations which offers programs for families of preteens and teens to learn about sex, puberty and growing up.
Gun Safety: Extreme Risk Protection Orders
The First Friday of June is Gun Violence Awareness Day. Trese Todd, Everytown Survivors Network Fellow and a Co-lead for the North Seattle Group of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense Washington State Chapter speaks with KBCS’s Yuko Kodama about the latest on the implementation of Extreme Risk Protection Orders, a law which passed in 2016.
A Gun Safety march across the I-90 bridge takes place this Sunday, June 9th. The event, Wear Orange, begins at 10 am at Sam Smith Park with speakers and music, before the walk across the bridge begins. According to Wear Orange, The public is encouraged to wear orange and decorate the streets with orange for that day.
Photo courtesy of Moms Demand Action
Yuko Kodama 0:00
With me in the studio today is Trese Todd, Every Town Survivors Network fellow, Trese Todd is also the co-lead for the North Seattle group of Moms Demand Action for Guns Sense Washington State chapter. Thanks for joining me in the studio Trese. Thank you for having me. So the Extreme Risk Protection Order in Washington State was passed in 2016. Give me some details on what this means.
Trese Todd 0:27
Well, Extreme Risk Protection Orders actually apply to anyone that a family member or law enforcement determines, and can articulate to the core, are a danger to either themselves in terms of suicide or others, and that would primarily fall into the categories of either domestic violence or hate crimes, and so a family member could go directly to the court.
You don’t need a lawyer there are websites available, you can just google Extreme Risk Protection Orders Washington State and find your way to a website that will kind of take you through the steps and what that looks like. But in addition to family members being able to make these kind of petitions, we’re really excited because law enforcement directly can do that. And often it’s law enforcement that really knows where the danger is. And then they can make those petitions and actually in a much more controlled and safe way, go and retrieve these guns, rather than getting a 911 family disturbance call in unbeknownst to them walking into, I don’t know, a firing range.
So we’re really, really excited about the fact that this not only helps to keep the community safer, maybe particular targets of the violence safer, but also law enforcement safer. We recently just had a workshop, a two hour workshop at the Seattle City Hall. And the experts there explained to us that really what is amazing is that what you don’t hear in the news, for example, the week right before that workshop, they went in and seized kind of an arsenal, from someone who was a white nationalist who was making some very, very dangerous threats online. And they were able to go in and pull all of those weapons away from him just the week before our workshop, that will never make the news, because nothing happened.
So It breaks my heart, that I have to wait until there’s a massacre. Before you know, we’re starting to pay attention, but hopefully now, the tide is turning. And we’re starting to see that these kind of laws are passing across the country. And I’m hoping that Seattle and Washington state can really be an example to others, to show them that this really can be done. They can be done effectively by the courts, implemented by police and keep people safe.
Yuko Kodama 2:55
Was there a time when there was kind of some hubbub about how it was going to be implemented concerning the resources that it takes?
Trese Todd 3:03
Well, one of the wonderful things about living in Washington is that we’re sort of out ahead of the curve. We passed what we call firearms surrender provisions within protective orders for domestic violence cases long ago, probably 20 years. So there was a lot of that discussion when this unit was being formed when it only applied to domestic violence orders. And so there was a lot of discussion of, and it took a lot of work to how are we going to get together with where do we store these guns and make sure they get returned if a judge says they have to be returned. And you know, there’s just a lot of procedures and policies and protocols that law enforcement agencies and prosecutors offices have to kind of figure out [like] who’s going to serve them who’s going to tell the police officers they have to go serve them, How are we going to get the details of where the guns actually are? Because it’s easy for someone to say I gave it to my brother or yeah, I used to have one but you know that somebody else like that ya dah dah dah. It’s just a constant ya dah dah.
And now we’re able to say, wait, we know exactly that this gun is in the ottoman, in the living room, can we, you know, it would be much better for you if you just surrender it to us now, can we get that now. And that is so powerful to be able to remove such a deadly, lethal weapon from a situation where there is a crisis. Usually when someone is asking, somebody’s in danger, somebody’s a threat, we really need to do something about this, they need that done within 24, 48, 72 hours, not a couple of months down the road. So, so it is that getting the procedures and the units in place that the immediate service, immediate implementation. And then if someone says, you know, I don’t have them, now actually prosecutors can then get a search warrant and go look for them. And if there’s violations of these orders, then people can ultimately go to jail for violating them.
So we’re finally getting some sort of real teeth to these borders. And I believe that these Extreme Risk Protection Order you’re probably, in my opinion, the most real time life saving provision we could possibly have. But they’re not very useful unless there’s an actual Enforcement Unit. And so our focus now is to make sure that the whole state is educated about Extreme Risk Protection Orders so that in every region of our great state, people can have this kind of protection.
Yuko Kodama 5:33
Trese Todd, Every Town Survivors Network fellow and co-lead for North Seattle group of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense, Washington State chapter. Thank you.
The Crack Epidemic’s Impact on Black Communities
Crack cocaine, swept throughout the US in the 1980s as an inexpensive and easily accessible drug. Neighborhoods and families were severely impacted by this epidemic. Aaron Dixon, the former Seattle Chapter Captain for the Black Panther Party, is writing a book on the impact of crack cocaine on black communities. Dixon describes how large amounts of cocaine began streaming through the US in the 60s and 70s due to U.S. government actions. He also recounts his personal experiences in trying to keep gang-involved youth alive and afloat at this tumultuous time.
Photo courtesy of blackpast.org
The Crack Epidemic and Its Impacts on Black Families
Yuko Kodama 0:00
You’re listening to 91.3 KBCS. This is Yuko Kodama, I interviewed Aaron Dixon, who is the former Black Panther Party, Seattle Chapter captain. He wrote the book, “My People Are Rising.” And more recently, he’s been finishing a second book. I spoke with Aaron Dixon earlier this month about the book he’s working on now. You had written, “My People Are Rising” and tell me what’s in your second book.
Aaron Dixon 0:29
My second book, well the – the working title is “Journey Through The Black Underground;” Ronald Reagan, crack cocaine, gang epidemic, destruction of the black family and the black community. And that’s what I explore – is the beginning of the 80s because I think the beginning of the 80s really exemplifies where we’re at right now. Of course, it didn’t begin with Ronald Reagan. It didn’t begin in the 1980s. Before Ronald Reagan in the 80s, there was a lot more possibilities that we could really create a more just society and a just world coming out of the Vietnam War, the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and coming out of the whole movement of the 60s and 70s… and all the things that the Black Panther Party did and all those movements of the 60s did. Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan was elected as president, and Ronald Reagan was the beginning. It was the beginning of a lot of things with Ronald Reagan was elected. Before Ronald Reagan we didn’t have large amounts of homeless people – we very rarely saw any homeless people. We had a level of socialism that existed in our society. College tuition was much more affordable because the wealthy we’re being taxed to pay for a lot of that college education. You know, our medical mental health system was still intact.
What I wanted to do is explain and lay a foundation to young people. To explain how we got to where we’re at right now. You know, one of the first things that Ronald Reagan began to do was he cut the mental health funding, almost in half or more than half which, you know, people who are mentally ill, they need help. They need a place to go. They need a place where they could live and sleep and get the help and the care that they need to get. And when you can’t provide that – when you as a society cannot provide for the mentally ill. You’re really laying the foundation for a failed society. And that was the beginning of what we saw what Ronald Reagan did, by slashing the funding for mental health that put thousands and thousands of mentally ill people out on the streets today. And as a matter of fact, a lot of the people who are in prison are mentally ill, because they have nowhere else to go. So they’ve ended up in prison, but by putting a lot of them out on the streets, you had a lot of things that happened to them, as well as things that they did to other people, you know, there were people that were killed and murdered by the mentally ill, because we weren’t willing to take care of them. He also slashed the funding for HUD. Not in half, but damn near in half, you know, subsidized housing was slashed under Ronald Reagan. And then of course, you know, the war on drugs really began with Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon laid the foundation for the war on drugs. There were a lot of black men that were arrested in the 70s.
And we started to go into our prison reform in the later part of the 70s. So it looked like you know, there would be some reform, and so many people wouldn’t be going to prison. Also, in Nicaragua, we had the Sandinistas who forced Samoza out of power, who was one of the most brutal dictators in South America, who got a lot of funding and a lot of support from the US government. And Ronald Reagan became so alarmed with Samoza being pushed out of office and that fear and paranoia of communists spreading throughout South America, you know, created this thing where we started funding a counter-revolutionary group, the Contras. Oliver North was involved to try to get funding to the Contras. Congress said that they weren’t going to fund it. So what did they do? The CIA turned to the Nicaraguan drug dealers who had been big time drug dealers in the 60s and 70s, who were also responsible for bringing a lot of cocaine into America, and so they began to use those drug dealers to import cocaine into America to raise money for the Contras to have this counter-revolutionary war against the Nicaraguan government and the Nicaraguan people who had fought and died to create a better society in their country. And so, you know, millions and millions of pounds start finding its way into America.
Now, this wasn’t the first time that the CIA was involved in drug dealing. The very first time that the CIA began to get involved in drug dealing was during the Vietnam War. When there was a General Pao, who was the General in Laos, who was the kingpin drug dealer in Southeast Asia, the CIA became partners with him. First of all, they started giving him planes to be able to export his heroin around Southeast Asia. And then the next thing they did was introduce him to Gianconfe, one of the leaders – leading mobsters in New York. They connected him with General Po, and that’s when they began, the mob began to import heroin into America. And you saw a devastating effect of this heroin that came into America in the 60s, particularly was coming into New York and created a heroin epidemic.
You even see “The Godfather,” alluding to this in the movie, the first “Godfather,” you know, when Marlon Brando played the role, and he said, “Well, you know, we don’t want the- heroine is dirty. We don’t want that.” And then when the other Mobsters said, “we’re just going to give it to the n****rs”, that’s what he said, and so that was the first time the CIA brought heroin into America. And what that did then was it created a whole epidemic of heroin addiction and crime, which began this war on drugs by Nixon, they began to put more black people in prison. So here it is, 10 years later, under Ronald Reagan, they’re importing all this cocaine into America. And at the same time, you have his wife saying, “just say no to cocaine”, and it’s – it’s proven that Ronald Reagan, Bush no one, were involved in this, and Bill Clinton, were involved in this cocaine coming into America. And at first it was going to LA because in LA there was a man who was a businessman in Nicaragua. He was a sympathizer of the Contras, and he wanted to raise money for the Contras. So the CIA contacted him and asked him to work with him. So they were shipping him millions of pounds of cocaine into America. But he needed an outlet. And it just so happened that he found an outlet – this young man named Ricky Ross, who was a black – all this is in the “Dark Alliance,” a book by Gary Webb, called “Dark Alliance” and he researched this for over 10 years.
Now, Ricky Ross was a young black man who wanted to be a tennis player. He played tennis in high school. When he got out, he tried to get into college, but he couldn’t because he couldn’t read or write. So he went to trade school, and he met this black guy who was selling just a little bit of cocaine here and there, you know, because in the 70s, cocaine was a casual drug. Everybody was snorting it; Hollywood people, Congress people, everybody was snorting – it was a casual drug. But the more money you had, the more likelihood that you would get addicted to cocaine. And so when you have so many people using a drug like that, then people started experimenting with other ways and they get more access to more pure cocaine. And so, you know, first you had to powder cocaine, and then you had this thing, that people who had money started to smoke the pure cocaine, which was called “rock” – you know, like a big pure rock of cocaine. The Rock cocaine became popular, but you had to have more money to smoke that rock because it costs a lot of money. Okay, so Ricky Ross, he starts selling rock cocaine. But Ricky Ross, he’s smart, he knows how to market. So he sees how people are buying this coke, he said “Well, we got to make it more affordable for the average person.” So they come up with this method of cooking it down to this little small packages of 10 – 20 dollars a package. This is the crack now we’re talking about crack, it went from powder to rock, who was for the rich people, to crack to for the average person. It’s more addictive than anything that anybody has ever seen. I mean, people will come buy it and 10 minutes later they come back buy some more. It just like kept going and getting growing and growing bigger and people came more addicted and more addicted and he opened more crack houses and the gang see this and gangs have always been territorial. The gangs weren’t about making a lot of money. You know, they were doing small time hoodlum crimes, you know, and they were more concerned about their territory and different things like that. But when the gangs saw how lucrative this business was, they got involved. And the thing about it is this drug is so addictive, that people would do anything to get some more crack. And, you know, black mothers have always been the most maternal, because they had to take care of the slave masters kids. They were used to take care of other people’s kids. When slavery ended, they had a chance to take care of their kids. And so they were very – black mothers were very maternalistic. But when they used crack cocaine that maternalism went away.
And so people became highly addicted- I mean, everybody was getting addicted! Mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents; everybody is getting addicted under this crack. And the gangs, they’re making lots of money, but also it creates more violence. Because not only is cocaine coming into the country – into LA, specifically at this moment – but also a lot of guns and weapons are coming in by the CIA. I was in Oakland when crack cocaine hit. I was there. I saw what happened in Oakland when crack cocaine came. I saw the destruction that it did to families, to businesses, black owned businesses. You know, the other thing that was happening in the 80s was this materialism, this extreme materialism that people really didn’t care that much about in the 60s and 70s. Everybody wasn’t so consumed with wealth, but in the 80s it was all about money. It was all about getting your money, you know, and you had black athletes for the first time getting million dollar contracts and, you know, 10 million – you know, Michael Jordan, then you had, you know, you have Michael Jackson. And so materialism and money, it took over people’s minds in the 80s. And so, you know, I remember being in Oakland, I remember school teachers were selling cocaine because they wanted to get rich they want to have money too! So everybody was either selling cocaine, or they were using it.
I think all that the black community has gone through. We got to give ourselves some props that we – we survived that first of all, but that we are able to rise up above that, you know, and do better. And being able to overcome and producing a lot of great young black people. I mean, right now, black entertainers are in demand. Black filmmakers are in demand, creating some of the best films that have ever been made. black actors are in demand. And so the fact we may not be this solid group that we were in the 60s and 70s, we are dispersed and spread out in a lot of different avenues, but we have been able to rise above. You know, I’m thinking about the movie, “Moonlight,” that won an Academy Award – that was an extremely beautiful movie, and the fact that “Black Panther” is one of the highest grossing movies of all time. You know, we gotta give ourselves some props. We got to give ourself some props.
Yuko Kodama 14:57
That was Aaron Dixon, former Black Panther Party Seattle Chapter Captain. You’re listening to KBCS independent radio.
The Crack Epidemic’s Impact on Youth
Yuko Kodama 0:00
This is 91.3 KBCS listener supported radio. I’m Yuko Kodama. Aaron Dixon is the former Black Panther Party Seattle Chapter captain. After his work in the Black Panther Party, he continued on to work with youth in the Seattle Public Schools. He spoke with me about the drug epidemic during the 80s and 90s and its impact on Seattle youth. He starts by describing when and how youth gangs became prevalent in our region.
Aaron Dixon 0:28
When I was growing up, we had these superficial gangs, you know, we had names and we carry switchblades. And, you know, we fought mock battles with each other, you know, it was nothing serious. But the first black kid to get killed by another black kid in Seattle was in 1980. And before that, there were no gangs in Seattle. But the Crips came up to Seattle, so in defense, the kids in Seattle, had to create their own gang, a guy from Chicago, he was with the Black Gangster Disciples in Chicago, and he created the Black Gangster Disciples in Seattle, and they became the rival to the Crips and Bloods in Seattle and so you had this whole neighborhood warfare going on. And in 1990, Seattle started Seattle Team for Youth, which they hired all these people to work as counselors to work and all these gang counselors to work and all these different neighborhoods to try to fight against the gangs. And I got one of those jobs and I started working with young people in West Seattle, who were gang involved. So I’m raising my kids, as a single parent, and I’m also as a gang counselor, I’m working with all these young people who are in gangs, you know, and a lot of other, my fellow workers are also working with gangs. And we were trying to, you know, save as many young people as we could. Now, prior to 1980s, black kids did not go to foster care. Because we had such a strong community that if kids were homeless, there was always somebody that was going to take that child and there was always a family member that was going to take that child in. By 1980s. black kids have flooded the foster care system. Because the family and the community broke down.
And as a result of that, you know, these kids are traumatized. These kids have gone in the foster care system, they become traumatized, because a lot of those foster cares only care about money, it was it was it was pretty crazy. You not only had black families who were fleeing LA, who are bringing their kids to Seattle, to get away from the gangs. And bam, they get to Seattle, the gangs are here. The gangs are in Seattle. And a lot of the kids I worked with in Seattle, they had came from LA, because the parents are trying to get him away. So now they get game involved in Seattle, I had about 15-20 kids on my caseload and we were all trying to figure out how to work with these kids. You know, we really didn’t know exactly how to go about doing what we were doing. There were eight kids that I work with there on my caseload that were involved in homicides. We talked about 15, 16, 17 year old kids involved in homicide, they almost all of them brought guns to school, so I could either turn them in, and they would get expelled because the school had a zero policy. So what I say it was, “okay, when you bring your weapons to school, you got to come and turn them into me.” And that’s what they did. They came into my office in the morning, open up the file cabinet, they put all their guns in there and after school they came and got them, you know, because I had to build trust with them too. And I couldn’t tell them what I was gonna tell “don’t carry no guns. You can’t bring no gun to school.” They’re not gonna listen to me. Because you had gang warfare going on. They had to protect themselves and defend themselves. And so that’s the only way that I could keep them in school. And make sure they graduated.
One of the kids that I had on my caseload was a young man named Jeremiah Boucher. Jeremiah was a very smart young man, very intelligent, he was computer literate, when nobody else was computer literate. He came from a middle class family, grandparents, from Africa, but his father left and went back to Africa, his mother had to raise three kids by herself. So his older brother was gang involved. His older brother tried to rob a store in High Point in West Seattle. And he shot the store owner. And, and he, the store owner testified against him. Now, Jeremiah, I’ve been trying to get him in my group. But you know, he’s one of these smart kids, the smart, really smart kids, they’re not so apt to like, come into a group, you know, a gang intervention group, you know. And so I was, I just was getting ready, I just, he just started coming around, you know, he had his own car, 14 years old, he’s got his own car, he’s a short little guy. Ballet, you know, he took ballet, everything, just really smart. He started coming by and being inquisitive and everything. “Yeah, Aaron I’m gonna start coming to the group” and everything. And his brother gets sent to prison, because this Ethiopian store owner testified against him. Now Jeremiah, in his mind, he thinks, “okay, I have to get revenge on this guy for testifying against my brother.” So he goes in to the store, and kills the Ethiopian store owner. And became, he becomes the youngest person in state of Washington, sentenced to life in prison. So, you know, this is the type of stuff that was happening, you know, there was there was just a total breakdown in the family, total breakdown in the community, not a not a total breakdown in the community because people in the community are trying the best that they can, to try to do that. There are a lot of people in the community did step up, you know, like, the football coaches, baseball coaches, and, you know, other sports, you know, they would bring kids in, some of them would take the kids home, and, you know, everybody’s trying to, you know, save our community, it just had a devastating effect. And this went on up until the 2000s. And it was a breakdown of the family to break down the community. But it was all reinforced by Ronald Reagan.
Yuko Kodama 7:25
When you were working with the youth, what were you seeing as things that seem to resonate with people?
Aaron Dixon 7:32
Well, I was going through some things myself, you know, and I started doing affirmations, I started reading books about positive thinking, about affirmations, and creating affirmative things to say, you know, that made me feel better, and made me feel that I could achieve things. And so I started using that on the second group of kids that I worked with. And so this was the sharpest alternative high school, and we’re still heavily gang involved, these kids are bringing guns to school every day, all the kids are, almost all the kids were gang involved, and you know, and I was working with a lot of different kids, Filipino kids, mostly black kids. And so one day, I decided that I was going to introduce him to affirmations. And I didn’t know how it would come off. I didn’t know if they would laugh at me. And so “Aaron, this is silly, this is stupid, we’re not going to do this.” So I did, I asked the principal, to give me a class, once a week that I could have once a week for my kids, and the teachers were reluctant. They say no, “you’re going to take the kids out of class, they need to be in class,” I said, “Well, let me have them for a hour, once a week, and I guarantee you, they will be better students. So I brought all these kids together and I started introducing them to affirmations, I write the affirmations on the board and I explained to them the power of the mind, how the mind works, what you put in your mind, that’s what you get, you put positive things in there, then you’re going to be move forward and have success, if you’re getting negative things in your mind, all the time, then you’re not going to have success. So I wrote these affirmations and you know it blew my mind they started saying them, We would say the affirmations three times. And then I gave him a list of affirmations to take home. And I instructed them to say the affirmations in the morning when they look in the mirror and say these affirmations “I’m the power within I am what I am, what I am has beauty and strength,” you know, very basic stuff. And man, these kids start turning around, they start telling me, it blew my mind. I had some resistance from one kid, I had to put him out. Because he just had a negative mind and nothing positive was going to seep in, I tell him myself, “Okay, you have to leave the class because you’re, you’re going to interfere with what I’m trying to do.” And the principal gave me a list of 17 boys, she said “Aaron,” Mrs. Moore, I got to give her credit at sharpest high school, she said, “Aaron, I need to have these boys graduate.” All 17 of those boys graduated. And these were gang involved kids. And they did it by saying affirmations, believing in themselves, saying these positive things. Of course, I did a lot of other things with them, taking them on field trips, University of Washington and bringing in guest speakers and all those types of things. But it was the affirmations that had an effect that got them to switch their mind around from a negative thing that they were thinking to more positive things. And so that was the most important tool that I could find, to really help turn around kids. But to think about affirmations, you got to keep saying them. They all graduated, but some of the kids who left they ended up getting into trouble anyway because they stopped saying the affirmations. So, but that was the most important thing that I had was to learn how to teach young people how to think positive, you know, think positive about themselves, and be able to visualize them doing something positive with their life. When I was doing the affirmations, there was a Laotian kid who a gang of our Roshan kid, he came up to me, he said, “Aaron, the only reason why I come to school is to say affirmations.” That was a beautiful thing to hear him say, I’ve had other kids say that “the only reason why I’m coming to school Aaron is a say these affirmations.” Yeah. Shows you how powerful it is to put into your mind, the things that you believe about yourself are true. So I guess that’s all I have to say.
Yuko Kodama 12:15
Yeah, thank you so much. Aaron Dixon, former Black Panther Party leader. Aaron Dixon has written a book titled My People Are Rising. He’s working. He’s currently working on a second book about the impact of the drug epidemic on black families. I’m Yuko Adama and this is KBCS.
The Impact of the Drug Epidemic on Black Families
Crack cocaine, swept throughout the US in the 1980’s as an inexpensive and easily accessible drug. Neighborhoods and families were severely impacted by this epidemic. Aaron Dixon, the former Seattle Chapter Captain for the Black Panther Party, is writing a book on the impact of crack cocaine on black communities. He starts by describing how large amounts of cocaine began streaming through the US in the 60’s and 70’s.
0:00
You’re listening to 91.3 KBCS. This is Yuko Kodama, I interviewed Aaron Dixon, who is the former Black Panther Party, Seattle Chapter captain. He wrote the book, “My People Are Rising”. And more recently, he’s been finishing a second book. I spoke with Aaron Dixon earlier this month about the book he’s working on now. You had written, “My People Are Rising” and tell me what’s in your second book.
0:29
My second book, well the – the working title is “Journey Through The Black Underground”; Ronald Reagan, crack cocaine, gang epidemic, destruction of the black family and the black community. And that’s what I explore – is the beginning of the 80’s because I think the beginning of the 80’s really exemplifies where we’re at right now.
0:55
Of course, it didn’t begin with Ronald Reagan. It didn’t begin in the 1980’s. Before Ronald Reagan in the 80’s, there was a lot more possibilities that we could really create a more just society and a just world coming out of the Vietnam War, the impeachment of Richard Nixon, and coming out of the whole movement of the 60’s and 70s’… and all the things that the Black Panther Party did and all those movements of the 60’s did. Unfortunately, Ronald Reagan was elected as president, and Ronald Reagan was the beginning. It was the beginning of a lot of things with Ronald Reagan was elected. Before Ronald Reagan we didn’t have large amounts of homeless people – we very rarely saw any homeless people. We had a level of socialism that existed in our society. College tuition was much more affordable because the wealthy we’re being taxed to pay for a lot of that college education. You know, our medical mental health system was still intact.
2:05
What I wanted to do is explain and lay a foundation to young people. To explain how we got to where we’re at right now. You know, one of the first things that Ronald Reagan began to do was he cut the mental health funding, almost in half or more than half which, you know, people who are mentally ill, they need help. They need a place to go. They need a place where they could live and sleep and get the help and the care that they need to get. And when you can’t provide that – when you as a society cannot provide for the mentally ill. You’re really laying the foundation for a failed society. And that was the beginning of what we saw what Ronald Reagan did, by slashing the funding for mental health that put thousands and thousands of mentally ill people out on the streets today. And as a matter of fact, a lot of the people who are in prison are mentally ill, because they have nowhere else to go. So they’ve ended up in prison, but by putting a lot of them out on the streets, you had a lot of things that happened to them, as well as things that they did to other people, you know, there were people that were killed and murdered by the mentally ill, because we weren’t willing to take care of them. He also slashed the funding for HUD. Not in half, but damn near in half, you know, subsidized housing was slashed under Ronald Reagan. And then of course, you know, the war on drugs really began with Richard Nixon. Richard Nixon laid the foundation for the war on drugs. There were a lot of black men that were arrested in the 70’s.
3:58
And we started to go into our prison reform in the later part of the 70’s. So it looked like you know, there would be some reform, and so many people wouldn’t be going to prison. Also, in Nicaragua, we had the Sandinistas who forced Samoza out of power, who was one of the most brutal dictators in South America, who got a lot of funding and a lot of support from the US government. And Ronald Reagan became so alarmed with Samoza being pushed out of office and that fear and paranoia of communists spreading throughout South America, you know, created this thing where we started funding a counter-revolutionary group, the Contras. Oliver North was involved to try to get funding to the Contras. Congress said that they weren’t going to fund it. So what did they do? The CIA turned to the Nicaraguan drug dealers who had been big time drug dealers in the 60’s and 70’s, who were also responsible for bringing a lot of cocaine into America, and so they began to use those drug dealers to import cocaine into America to raise money for the Contras to have this counter-revolutionary war against the Nicaraguan government and the Nicaraguan people who had fought and died to create a better society in their country. And so, you know, millions and millions of pounds start finding its way into America.
5:46
Now, this wasn’t the first time that the CIA was involved in drug dealing. The very first time that the CIA began to get involved in drug dealing was during the Vietnam War. When there was a General Po, who was the General in Laos, who was the kingpin drug dealer in Southeast Asia, the CIA became partners with him. First of all, they started giving him planes to be able to export his heroin around Southeast Asia. And then the next thing they did was introduce him to Jim Conniff, one of the leaders – leading mobsters in New York. They connected him with General Po, and that’s when they began, the mob began to import heroin into America. And you saw a devastating effect of this heroin that came into America in the 60’s, particularly was coming into New York and created a heroin epidemic.
6:58
You even see “The Godfather”, alluding to this in the movie, the first “Godfather”, you know, when Marlon Brando played the role, and he said, “Well, you know, we don’t want the- heroine is dirty. We don’t want that.” And then when the other Mobsters said, “we’re just going to give it to the n****rs”, thats what he said, and so that was the first time the CIA brought heroin into America. And what that did then was it created a whole epidemic of heroin addiction and crime, which began this war on drugs by Nixon, they began to put more black people in prison. So here it is, 10 years later, under Ronald Reagan, they’re importing all this cocaine into America. And at the same time, you have his wife saying, “just say no to cocaine”, and it’s – it’s proven that Ronald Reagan, Bush no. one, were involved in this, and Bill Clinton, were involved in this cocaine coming into America. And at first it was going to LA because in LA there was a man who was a businessman in Nicaragua. He was a sympathizer of the Contras, and he wanted to raise money for the Contras. So the CIA contacted him and asked him to work with him. So they were shipping him millions of pounds of cocaine into America. But he needed an outlet. And it just so happened that he found an outlet – this young man named Ricky Ross, who was a black – all this is in the “Dark Alliance”, a book by Gary Webb, called “Dark Alliance” and he researched this for over 10 years.
8:54
Now, Ricky Ross was a young black man who wanted to be a tennis player. He played tennis in high school. When he got out, he tried to get into college, but he couldn’t because he couldn’t read or write. So he went to trade school, and he met this black guy who was selling just a little bit of cocaine here and there, you know, because in the 70s, cocaine was a casual drug. Everybody was snorting it; Hollywood people, Congress people, everybody was snorting – it was a casual drug. But the more money you had, the more likelihood that you would get addicted to cocaine. And so when you have so many people using a drug like that, then people started experimenting with other ways and they get more access to more pure cocaine. And so, you know, first you had to powder cocaine, and then you had this thing, that people who had money started to smoke the pure cocaine, which was called “rock” – you know, like a big pure rock of cocaine. The Rock cocaine became popular, but you had to have more money to smoke that rock because it costs a lot of money. Okay, so Ricky Ross, he starts selling rock cocaine. But Ricky Ross, he’s smart, he knows how to market. So he sees how people are buying this coke, he said “Well, we got to make it more affordable for the average person.” So they come up with this method of cooking it down to this little small packages of 10 – 20 dollars a package. This is the crack now we’re talking about crack, it went from powder to rock, who was for the rich people, to crack to for the average person. It’s more addictive than anything that anybody has ever seen. I mean, people will come buy it and 10 minutes later they come back buy some more. It just like kept going and getting growing and growing bigger and people came more addicted and more addicted and he opened more crack houses and the gang see this and gangs have always been territorial. The gangs weren’t about making a lot of money. You know, they were doing small time hoodlum crimes, you know, and they were more concerned about their territory and different things like that. But when the gangs saw how lucrative this business was, they got involved. And the thing about it is this drug is so addictive, that people would do anything to get some more crack. And, you know, black mothers have always been the most maternal, because they had to take care of the slave masters kids. They were used to take care of other people’s kids. When slavery ended, they had a chance to take care of their kids. And so they were very – black mothers were very maternalistic. But when they used crack cocaine that maternalism went away.
11:56
And so people became highly addicted- I mean, everybody was getting addicted! Mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, grandparents; everybody is getting addicted under this crack. And the gangs, they’re making lots of money, but also it creates more violence. Because not only is cocaine coming into the country – into LA, specifically at this moment – but also a lot of guns and weapons are coming in by the CIA. I was in Oakland when crack cocaine hit. I was there. I saw what happened in Oakland when crack cocaine came. I saw the destruction that it did to families, to businesses, black owned businesses. You know, the other thing that was happening in the 80’s was this materialism, this extreme materialism that people really didn’t care that much about in the 60’s and 70’s. Everybody wasn’t so consumed with wealth, but in the 80s it was all about money. It was all about getting your money, you know, and you had black athletes for the first time getting million dollar contracts and, you know, 10 million – you know, Michael Jordan, then you had, you know, you have Michael Jackson. And so materialism and money, it took over people’s minds in the 80’s. And so, you know, I remember being in Oakland, I remember school teachers were selling cocaine because they wanted to get rich they want to have money too! So everybody was either selling cocaine, or they were using it.
13:33
I think all that the black community has gone through. We got to give ourselves some props that we – we survived that first of all, but that we are able to rise up above that, you know, and do better. And being able to overcome and producing a lot of great young black people. I mean, right now, black entertainers are in demand. Black filmmakers are in demand, creating some of the best films that have ever been made. black actors are in demand. And so the fact we may not be this solid group that we were in the 60’s and 70’s, we are dispersed and spread out in a lot of different avenues, but we have been able to rise above. You know, I’m thinking about the movie, “Moonlight”, that won an Academy Award – that was an extremely beautiful movie, and the fact that “Black Panther” is one of the highest grossing movies of all time. You know, we gotta give ourselves some props. We got to give ourself some props.
14:57
That was Aaron Dixon, former Black Panther Party Seattle Chapter Captain. You’re listening to KBCS independent radio.
The Impact of the Crack Epidemic on Seattle Area Youth
The crack epidemic of the 80’s and 90’s and its entanglement with increased gun presence and gang activity deeply impacted communities throughout the US. Aaron Dixon, the author of the book, My People Are Rising, and former Captain of the Black Panther Party Seattle Chapter, worked closely with gang involved youth at the time. He describes what challenges the youth faced, and what approach to working with them was most successful.
Photo courtesy of blackpast.org
Yuko Kodama 0.00
This is 91.3 KBCS listener supported radio. I’m Yuko Kodama. Aaron Dixon is the former Black Panther Party Seattle Chapter captain. After his work in the Black Panther Party, he continued on to work with youth in the Seattle Public Schools. He spoke with me about the drug epidemic during the 80s and 90s and its impact on Seattle youth. He starts by describing when and how youth gangs became prevalent in our region.
Aaron Dixon
When I was growing up, we had these superficial gangs, you know, we had names, and we carried switchblades. And, you know, we fought mock battles with each other. You know, it was nothing serious. But the first black kid to get killed by another black kid in Seattle was in 1980. And before that there were no gangs in Seattle. But the Crips came up to Seattle.
So in defense, the kids in Seattle had to create their own gangs. A guy from Chicago, he was with the Black Gangster Disciples in Chicago, and he created the Black Gangster Disciples in Seattle, and they became the rival to the Crips and Bloods in Seattle. And so you had this whole neighborhood warfare going on. And in 1990, Seattle started Seattle Team for Youth, which they hired all these people to work as counselors – to work and all these gang counselors are working all these different neighborhoods to try to fight against the gangs. And I got one of those jobs. And I started working with young people in West Seattle who were gang involved. So I’m raising my kids, as a single parent, and I’m also a gang counselor. I’m working with all these young people who are gangs, you know, and a lot of other, my fellow workers were also working with gangs, and we were trying to, you know, save as many young people as we could.
Now, prior to 1980s, black kids did not go to foster care. Because we had such a strong community that if kids were homeless, there was always somebody that was going to take that child in – there was always a family member that was going to take that child in. By 1980s, black kids have flooded the foster care system. Because the family and the community broke down. And as a result of that, you know, these kids are traumatized. These kids have gone into foster care system. They become traumatized. Because a lot of those foster care homes are just about money.
And, you know, it was – it was a very, it was it was pretty crazy. You not only had black families who were fleeing LA, who are bringing their kids to Seattle to get away from the gangs, and bam, they get to Seattle – the gangs are here. The gangs are in Seattle. And a lot of the kids I worked with in Seattle, they had came from LA, because their parents were trying to get em’ away. So now they get gang involved in Seattle. You know, I had, man, I had about 15-20 kids on my caseload. And we were all trying to figure out how to work with these kids. You know, we really didn’t know exactly how to go about doing what we were doing. There were eight kids that I worked with, that were on my caseload, that were involved in homicides. We talking about 15, 16, 17 year old kids involved in homicide.
They, almost all of them, brought guns to school. So I could either turn them in, and they would get expelled because the school had a zero policy. So what I say it “was okay, when you bring your weapons to school, you got to come and turn them into me”. And that’s what they did. They came into my office in the morning, I open up the file cabinent, they put all their guns in there and after school they came and got them, you know, cuz I had to build trust with them too. And I couldn’t tell them, what I’m gonna tell? “Don’t carry no guns. You can’t bring no gun to school.” They’re not gonna listen to me. Because you had gang warfare going on. And they had, they had to protect themselves and defend themselves. And so that’s the only way that I could keep them in school and make sure they graduated.
One of the kids that I had on my caseload was a young man named Jeremiah Bourgeois. Jeremiah was a very smart young man, very intelligent. He was computer literate when no other body else was computer literate. He came from middle class families and grandparents from Africa. But his father left and went back to Africa, his mother had to raise three kids by herself. So his father, his older brother was gang involved. His older brother tried to rob a store in high point in West Seattle. And he shot the store owner, and, and he, the store owner, testified against him. Now Jeremiah, I’ve been trying to get him in my group. But you know, he’s one of these smart kids, the smart, really smart kids. They’re not so apt to like come into a group, you know, a gang intervention group, you know. And so I was I just was getting ready. I just – he just started coming around. You know, he had his own car, 14 years old. He’s got his own car, he’s a short little guy. Ballet, you know, he took ballet, everything. Just really something – started coming by – being inquisitive and everything. “Yeah, Aaron, imma start coming to the group and everything”. And his brother gets sent to prison because this Ethiopian store owner testified against him. Now Jeremiah, in his mind, he thinks, “okay, I have to revenge this guy for testifying against my brother”. So he goes in to the store and kills the Ethiopian store owner. And became – he becomes the youngest person in the state of Washington sentenced to life in prison.
So, you know, this is the type of stuff that was happening, you know, there was there was just a total breakdown in the family, total breakdown in the community, not a, not a total breakdown that came in because people in the community are trying the best that they can to try to do this. There are a lot of people in the community that did step up, you know, like, the young – the football coaches and the baseball coaches, and, you know, other sports, you know, they would bring kids in, some of them would take the kids home and, you know, everybody’s trying to save, you know, save our community. It was – just had a devastating effect. And this went on up until, you know, up until the 2000’s, and it was a breakdown of the family – to break down the humanity. But it was all reinforced by Ronald Reagan.
Yuko Kodama 7:10
When you were working with the youth, what were you seeing as things that seemed to resonate with people?
Aaron Dixon 7:18
Well, I was going through some things myself, you know, and I started doing affirmations. I started reading books about positive thinking and about affirmations and creating affirmative things to say, you know, that made me feel better and made me feel that I could achieve things. And so I started using that on the second group of kids that I worked with. And this was at Sharples Alternative High School, and there was still heavily gang involved. I mean these kids are bringing guns to school every day. All the kids, almost all the kids, were gang involved, you know, and I was working with a lot of different kids, Filipino kids, mostly black kids.
And so one day, I decided that I was going to introduce them to affirmations. And I didn’t know how it would come off. I didn’t know if they would laugh at me. And say “Oh, Aaron, this is silly. This is stupid. We not gonna do this”. So I did. I asked the principal, to give me a class once a week that I could have once a week for my kids and the teachers were reluctant. They say, “No, you’re going to take the kids out of class, they need to be in class”. I said, “Well, let me have them for an hour. Once a week, and I guarantee you they will be better students”. So I brought all these kids together. And I started introducing them to affirmations. I write the affirmations on the board. And I explained to them the power of the mind, how the mind works, what you put in your mind – that’s what you get.
You put positive things in there then you’re going to be move forward and have success. If you’re getting negative things in your mind, all the time, then you’re not going to have success. So I wrote these affirmations and you know and it blew my mind. They started saying them.
You know, we would say the affirmations three times, then I gave them a list of affirmations to take home.
And I instructed them to say the affirmations in the morning when they look in the mirror and say these affirmations. “I am the power within”. “I am what I am”. “What I am has beauty and strength”, you know, very basic stuff. And, man, these kids start turning around, they start turning – and it blew my mind. You know, I had I had some resistance from one kid. I had to put him out because he just had a negative mind and nothing positive was gonna seep in. I just tell him myself, you have to leave the class because you’re, you’re going to interfere with what I’m trying to do. And the principal gave me a list of 17 boys, she said, “Aaron”, Mrs. Moore, I got to give her credit at Sharples High School. She said, “Aaron, I want – I need to have these boys graduate. And so all 17 of those boys graduated. These were gang involved kids. And they did it by saying affirmations, you know, believing in themselves – saying these positive things. Of course, I did a lot of other things with them, taking them on field trips, University of Washington and bringing in guest speakers and all those types of things. But it was the affirmation that had an effect that got them to switch their mind around from a negative thing that they were thinking, to more positive things. And so that was the most important tool that I could find, to really help turn around kids. But to think about affirmations, you got to keep saying them. And so, you know, some of the kids who grad- they all graduated, but some of the kids who left they ended up getting into trouble anyway because they stopped saying their affirmations. So, but that was the most important thing that I had was to learn how to teach young people how to think positive, you know, think positive about themselves, and be able to visualize, you know, them doing something positive with their life.
When I was doing the affirmations, there was a Laotian kid, a gang involved Laotian kid, he came up to me, he said, “Aaron, the only reason why I come to school is to say affirmations”.
That was a beautiful thing to hear him say – I’ve had other kids say that too “the only reason why I come to school, Aaron, is to say these affirmations”. Yeah. Shows you how powerful it is to put into your mind things that you believe about yourself are true, you know. So I guess that’s all I have to say.
Yuko Kodama 12:13
Yeah, thank you so much. Aaron Dixon and former Black Panther Party leader.
Aaron Dixon 12:19
Thank you.
Yuko Kodama 12:20
Aaron Dixon has written a book titled “My People are Rising”. He’s working – He’s currently working on a second book about the impact of the drug epidemic on black families. I’m Yuko Kodama and this is KBCS.
Sankofa Impact: 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing
On September 15th, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, killing four young girls. This bombing marked a turning point in the United States during the Civil Rights Movement, and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dr. Carolyn McKinstry was 15 years old at the time, and was in the building when the bomb exploded. Dr. McKinstry addressed participants of Project Pilgrimage, an immersive civil rights journey about that day in 2018.
The Griot Party
The Griot Party is an event that encourages community healing for all black and brown people whose lives and lineage have been impacted by the transatlantic slave trade. Listen to Logic Amen, Griot Party Producer, Artist and Educator, speak to what the Griot has symbolized, and the space that the Griot Party events offer for the healing of black men.
Dahr Jamail – The End of Ice
Dahr Jamail, Journalist and Author the book, The End of Ice spoke at a Seattle Town Hall Event on March 26th.
Special thanks to Town Hall Seattle for the recorded audio.
Jesse C 0:17
Good morning. This is the KBCS Blend on 91.3 I’m Jesse Callahan. Coming up on the Blend: a special presentation by journalist and writer Dahr Jamal on climate disruption. Jamal spoke about his book, ‘The End of Ice’ at a Seattle Town Hall event in March of 2019, at The Summit On Pike. Thanks again for joining us and making the KBCS Blend part of your morning.
Jamal 0:49
So this book and my journey of reporting on climate disruption started back in 1995. That was the first time I went to Alaska and laid eyes on Denali. And it was love at first sight- and it was like this tractor beam started and pulled me she was like saying, “Come on, come on up.” and and I just knew that was the place on the planet where I needed to spend a lot of time. And so a year later, I moved up to Alaska and started mountaineering. And not- It wasn’t about conquering peaks or any of that nonsense. It was just about that was the place on the planet that for some reason I felt deeply drawn to be and spend as much time as I could. And so accompanying that was an immediate lesson in climate disruption. It was 1996. And I was going out to early season ice climbing fests outside of Anchorage. And the glacier that we were going to, the Matanuska glacier, was receding every year further and further, quickly, and so they’d have to move the parking lot closer to it, the dirt you know, expand the dirt road in further, and then the long, the walk would get longer again, each year, pools forming on the glacier, things like this, going through Christmases in Anchorage with no snow on the ground, dramatic temperature shifts. So it was clear, then, even though I really had very little personal politics, I was a long ways off from starting to work as a journalist, and certainly wasn’t studying climate disruption. But it was clear, as people in Alaska know that with the Arctic warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, that something was amiss. So I was actually working on Denali, I started just climbing it individually, and then working as a guide, and then later working as a volunteer with the National Park Service. And it was up on top of- or on the heights of Denali, listening to the BBC World Service in my tent at night, during the Iraq invasion, in 2003, that something inside of me said, you’re going to need to go do something. The regular activism and writing letters to senators and things like this is not getting the job done… So I felt this pull to go over to Iraq, and just write about how the Iraqi people were being impacted. And so I was younger and crazier. And so I just sent myself into Iraq, bought a laptop, and a camera, and I started reporting from the streets. And not too long after that I found myself in Fallujah. And all of a sudden, I was working as a journalist. And I followed that thread because it came to me from being really, really tied into a place on the planet that was really, really special. To me, I see that today. And what I found, though, over there, obviously was horrific, and it was far, far worse than what most people here at the time at least understood was happening. I was reporting on atrocities being carried out by the US military; war crimes; ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, who was formerly the cool head, or the ‘grown up in the room’ of this so called administration, watching him single handedly order war crime after war crime being carried out in Fallujah. Now, of course, with the comfort of some time between those events and now, most of this is common knowledge and accepted in- in mainstream society here. But what’s been disturbing to me, especially working on this book, which I use the same model is my Iraq reporting… I sent myself out into the front lines where climate disruption is the most obvious- happening the most dramatically, the fastest, and in places that- a lot of the places I went to, the life that I went there to write about literally will not be there within 10 years. And I wanted to go there to really bring these places to people, since so many people won’t get a chance to go to the Amazon, or the Great Barrier Reef or a lot of these glaciers that are vanishing before our eyes, and really give people a visceral experience of, of what is happening to these places.
Jamal 5:31
And so I… I came into the book, though, thinking that I write this monthly climate dispatch for Truth Out and it’s essentially a heavily scientific based survey of the last 30 days of really deeply disturbing scientific studies that are being published showing how fast things are accelerating. And I came into this book thinking, “yeah, it’ll be mostly 75% science and that kind of thing”, because I was really angry. And I was frustrated that people weren’t really getting the magnitude of what’s happening, and especially getting how far along we already are. And so like, the sentiment behind many of those dispatches, I was angry, and I wanted to kind of shock people awake. And, and, but then I started working on the book, which entailed having a much, much deeper relationship with the planet. And instead of this, this idea in my head, if it’s going to be 75%, science, and then maybe 25%, personal narrative and some nature writing, it flipped itself. And I started writing the book, and it became much more about, look at this planet, look at this planet, really look at this planet, where we are, and look at what’s happening to it. And look at how fast it’s happening. And I think started going out into these places, and getting broken open over and over and over again, which was exactly what happened to me, in Iraq, going into these places, and talking with these people and these families and these kids, and watching what was happening, and just getting broken open over and over and over again. And that- every chapter I wrote in this book, that was the experience, just like in Iraq, what happened. And so my hope tonight is I want to take you to a couple of these places, and do my best to bring at least a few moments of that experience to you. And and because we are at a point now where we’re literally in the sixth mass extinction, we’re losing over 100 species a day around the planet, and it’s accelerating. And this is a topic, as we heard in the introduction. What bigger topic is there? What more important topic is there? It affects all of us, even the people denying it, it affects all of us. And it’s going to intensify every day for the rest of our lives, no matter what we do. And we’re in it. And we’re going into it together. And my hope is that if we really let this information in and get a very accurate map of what’s happening, then we can come into it fully awake, and understand the grieving that’s going to have to happen and all the associated emotions in order to show up and go through that and then come out. That- I think a lot with a lot clearer eyes and a lot clearer heart, and a lot more focused on what’s really, really important and what we’re going to need to do together to go through this. So like I mentioned, the book provided me with great privilege of going out to some of the most amazing places on the planet with incredible people who had dedicated their entire lives to studying them. And I- I made it a point to go to places some of them I’d been to 20 years before and have long term relationships with. And if I couldn’t do that, then to go to these places and be in the company of scientists who’ve been studying them for 20,25,30 years. One of them longer than I’ve been alive and and talk with them about what they were seeing when they went out into these places.
Jamal 9:31
So I thought given our geography, and how reliant upon glaciers we are here in the Pacific Northwest- I just live over in Port Townsend. I thought I would start with taking us to Glacier National Park. There’s a man there named Dr. Dan Phaedra. He’s a scientist with the US Geological Survey. And he’s a research ecologist and directs the climate change in mountain ecosystems project there. He’s also in importantly, the lead investigator of the USGS benchmark glacier program. And he’s been working in the park since 1991. And the benchmark glacier program is really important, because glaciers really are a ‘canary in the coal mine’ of climate disruption. If you want to know what’s happening and how fast it’s happening, just look at what’s happening to the glaciers. In the benchmark glacier program they take a specific glacier that’s representative of the region where it’s located. There’s one in Glacier National Park, there’s one in North Cascades National Park, there’s one up in Alaska, and there’s some others. And they’ve been this program has been going on for over 50 years. And they measure them every year and tabulate, what’s their maximum, what’s their minimum, how much have they lost. And then this gives us a very, very accurate real time indicator of precisely what’s happening with climate disruption. And Dr. Fagre- I met with him and his office in the west part of the park. He’s very excited to talk about glaciers. And he had made international news that summer, when I met with them, because Montana was undergoing- experiencing record heat waves record wildfires. And the day I met with them, it was you know, in the middle of one of these heat waves a couple of summers ago. And so I’d like to read a brief section from my book. I had been talking with him and he took me out for a little ride up the ‘going to the sun highway’ up to Logan Pass- this really stunning highway carved into a very sheer mountain side going up to the past at about 6000 feet. And so we get up to the top of The Pass, we’ve been talking all the way up in his car taking notes. And he was being kind enough to stop and let me get out and gawk and take photos of the magnificent landscape. And we get up to the top and we we park and we walk up to an area where there used to be a glacier.
Jamal 12:00
And so that’s the setting for this conversation where he says, talking about what’s happening. “This is an explosion, a nuclear explosion of geologic change.” He’s just he says this describing the impact of climate disruption while we looked out across the valley together. “This is unusual, it is incredibly rapid and exceeds the ability for normal adaptation. We’ve shoved it into overdrive and taken our hands off the wheel.” He takes me to stand in another area of slush. “The people who built the Logan pass road had to deal with a glacier here, right here!” he says pointing down to our feet. Now there is no glacier to underscore his point. Fagre tells me that this year, they had 137% of the normal snowpack, and two days earlier, it was already below normal for the year, for this time of year because of the heat. “We had a snowfall up here recently that needed to be plowed”, he says smiling, “and it melted before they could plow it.” I asked him if that kind of thing is what keeps them up at night. He tells me “These are nonlinear changes that aren’t based on a simple proportional relationship between cause and effect. They are usually abrupt, unexpected and challenging to predict. The aggregate of multiple nonlinear changes is enormous in orders of magnitude- and that’s what keeps Dan Fagre worried at night.” He says, after a pause to let all that sink in, Fagre goes on to explain that the Earth has a resilient system that has been through much worse than what we’ve caused: ice ages, volcanism, etc. “So many of these things will recover,” he says of the glaciers and forests that are vanishing before our eyes, “but not in the timeframe that includes humans.”
Jamal 13:48
We return to the car and continue driving down the other side of the past, we roll down our windows, and neither one of us talks for a while. I know it’s a sensitive topic to bring up with scientists, and most of them avoid it at all costs. But I decided to ask him what it is like for him, especially to watch the glaciers vanish before his eyes. “It’s like being a battle hardened soldier,” he says, “but on a philosophical basis, it’s tough to watch the thing you study disappear.” I watch him drive for a couple of silent moments. And I look out across the valley and listen to the waterfalls, as they stream down toward the river far below us. Glacier National Park, around the time it was being considered to be made a national park, there were 150 glaciers that covered roughly 150 square kilometers of area. Today, they’re down to 26 glaciers, and they cover less than 20 square kilometers of area. The definition of a glacier changes depending on what region it’s in, in Glacier National Park, it has to cover a certain amount of square kilometers. And it has to move. Those are the two criteria and by those criteria of Fagre-. He made headlines that summer, when he announced that there will be no more glaciers in Glacier National Park by 2030. So that’s less than 11 years from now. He- also I quote him in the book saying this, and I cite the studies that back it up, we are on a trajectory to have no more glaciers in the contiguous 48 United States by 2100. So if we think about there’s two aspects of that, that I want to cover, one for us, it’s obvious. Here in the northwest, it’s it’s easy with this audience, we understand what glaciers mean for our groundwater, for drinking water, and for irrigation for growing crops. Without glaciers, much of that goes away. I mean, in 2015 when Jay Inslee declared statewide drought, but on May 15 of that year, in the Olympics, we had 6% of our snowpack, farmers on the peninsula were suffering, they were water rationing in Port Townsend, we had wildfires in the rain forest of Western Olympic National Park. So imagine if there’s no glaciers, what this means. Bigger scale, the Hindu Kush region in the Himalaya, another study came out. Recently, it was actually an update on one that I had- a previous study i’d cited in the book, this is a region where seven of Asia’s major rivers, it’s their headwaters, because it’s one of the largest ice sheets in the world outside of the poles. And those that ice it current trajectories, up to 99% of it will be gone. By 2100. 1.5 billion people rely on those waters for drinking water and irrigation. So extrapolate: You have to think about it for about 15 seconds. Where do those people go? And then what happens to the areas where they go, and where does all that water and food come from. So you can see where this is going. It’s- I could talk the rest of and the rest of the talk, just talking about what- you know some of the human ramifications when we kind of extrapolate and play those scenarios out. But another one that I think doesn’t get talked about enough, and I wasn’t aware of it until I hung out with Dr. Fagre and some of the USGS scientists I went out with on glaciers up in Alaska, it’s the ecological impacts. So some broad brushstrokes: if you have a glacier in a valley, that- the streams coming out of that, obviously, are going to be cold. The temperature, the ambient temperature, of the valley is going to be kept down because of the glacier. And there’s going to be certain fish and- and not mosquitoes, but it’s other insects in in the runoff streams from those glaciers. And as those glaciers go away, then the fish and the insects that live in those streams are going to go away, as are all the animals that rely upon those, the groundwater is going to change. So certain trees that are there other kinds of vegetation, and then everything living in those and everything dependent upon the things that are living in those, all of that’s going to change, and much of it’s going to go away. So there’s tremendous ecological impacts to all the other species as well, when glaciers go away. It’s not just this thing that’s going to affect humans. And it’s not just this aesthetic thing. “Oh, there’s no more beautiful glaciers on Mount Rainier to look at.” But, but lots of other species are going to be gone when we lose glaciers- not if but when.
Jamal 18:52
The next place that I would like to take you is the Amazon briefly. I was really tremendously lucky to get to go there. And some brief statistics. Many of you probably know some of this, but just for context, it’s the single largest rain forest on the planet. It’s two thirds the size of the contiguous United States, the Amazon basin. It generates half of its own rainfall and contains 20% of the world’s rivers. The Amazon river alone has 1100 tributaries, 17 of them longer than 1000 miles each. There’s thousands of species of trees, 2.5 million species of insects, thousands of species of birds, and 3000 species of fish in the Rio Negro alone. I spoke with one scientist who was part of an expedition- it was 25 scientists, they went out for 30 days to a remote region in the Amazon. And in that one expedition alone, they discovered more than 80 new species: fish, insects, birds, frogs, etc. On average a species is to this day being discovered in the Amazon at least every two days. The average is actually a little bit more than that. So we know a lot about it. We know enough about it to know how much we don’t know about it. So I was privileged to get to go there with Dr. Thomas Lovejoy. He’s also referred to often as ‘the godfather of bio diversity.’ He has been studying the Amazon since 1965. He was head of the World Wildlife Fund for 14 years. He was a White House Science Council and his resume- it would it would take you a little time to read his full resume. He’s a leading expert on biodiversity and- on the planet. So we met up with Dr. Lovejoy and analysis big city of about two and a half million people in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon, piled into jeeps took a very long, windy, bumpy, hot Jeep ride deep into the jungle. And then we arrived at this little trailhead, and he hopped out, grabbed his backpack and hightailed down this trail. The rest of us get out, you know, kind of slowly stretch and grab our backpacks and started hiking down this trail. And he’s down there meeting us- this esteemed scientists who was actually quite quiet, and and very, very humble. And he went down there quickly so that he could greet each one of us and shake our hand and look in our eye and thank us for taking the time out of our busy schedules to come visit his camp. That’s the kind of person he is. And that’s why he’s dedicated his whole life to studying this area that he cares so much about. So you get into the camp, it’s Camp 41. It’s the most famous of several other camps that are set up to study these different fragments of the rain forest. And there’s no walls. Over on one side of the camp, there’s a big tin roof with hammock strung up and so you go grab your hammock, they have mosquito netting over them and you fill your backpack there. And then in another area, there’s some picnic tables and a kitchen. And then over on the other side of Camp is where the scientists are camped out in their their hammocks. And for anyone who hasn’t been to the Amazon it’s- and this was my first and only time to go there, it was a really, really remarkable experience. I mean, you can read about it and see photo books and watch documentaries. But to go there was an entirely different experience. I mean, it was obvious to me from the first night that something was happening, that it literally came into my dreams. I started literally having dreams the first night about the jungle, it was as though I could like feel myself being pulled into it. Some of the dreams really shook me up. Others were quite enlightening. And then we would wake up in the mornings with the roar of troops of howler monkeys, drifting through camp, birdsong coming at first light, and then getting to go out on these walks in the jungle with these experts learning about vines and trees and insects. And then as the longer we stayed there, this group of us this kind of disparate group from around the world, people from all kinds of different countries speaking different languages, but even just after a couple of days, we found ourselves acting like a family just really coming together, sharing meals, really curious about each other, kind of stories feeding off each other, and really coming together as a group and in the same experience with all these different scientists also from around the world. And, and in- when I was there, it was obvious like “this is the jungle, this is what it does!” It’s just like pure life force that was just like pulling us all into it. And together, you know, all one thing. And that was that was, you know, that’s really the best way I can describe that experience. And it was truly remarkable. And so one of the scientists that I met there, his name’s Vethek Jerinek he’s from the Czech Republic. And he’d worked at the time in at least 11 different Wildlife Research positions around the globe. And he was there currently getting his PhD in oranthology from Louisiana State University, and he had admired Dr. Lovejoy since he was a kid reading ‘Song of the Dodo’. And it was his dream there then to be studying at Camp 41. And at times, literally working alongside Dr. Lovejoy, and he was very excited talking about that and talking about some of the things he was studying. But I want to read a brief bit from one of our conversations once we started talking about the impacts of climate disruption and what he was seeing.
Jamal 24:55
He assumes a somber tone when we talk about his research, quote, “Island biogeography is no longer an offshore enterprise. It has come to the mainland. It’s everywhere. The problems of animal and plant populations, left marooned within various fragments under circumstances that are untenable for the long term has begun showing up all over the land surface of the planet. The familiar questions arise how many mountain gorillas inhabit the forested slopes of the Virunga volcanoes along the shared boundaries of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Rwanda? How many Tigers live in the service of Tiger Reserve north of Northwestern India? How many are left? How long can they survive?” Now there is anger in his voice. “How many grizzly bears occupy the North Cascades ecosystem, a discreet patch of mountain forest along the northern border of the state of Washington? Not enough. How many European brown bears are there in Italy’s Abruzzo National Park? Not enough. How many Florida Panthers in Big Cypress Swamp? Not enough. How many Asiatic lions in the Forest of Gir? Not enough. How many Indri in the (unintelligable)? Not enough, and so on. The world is broken into pieces now. Just before going to Camp 41. As I mentioned, we were in Manaus. And it was there I met another amazing scientist, who also had been working with Dr. Lovejoy for a long time. And she of all the scientists that I interviewed- for and in the book definitely has the best name, particularly given her study. Her name is Dr. Rita Mesquita. She’s a biologist and researcher with the largest research institute in the Amazon. And so she, when she was in Manaus, she worked, there’s a forest fragment right inside the city, with nature paths through it, and she would take people through it on educational walks, very excited, you know, rattling off all kinds of statistics about species and their habits and all these things. And again, kind of like the experience with Vetehk(?). You know, it was amazing to see her, very bubbly and excited and, and just- information just flowing out of her like a river. But then after walking out and looking at the jungle and being educated by herr, she took us into a back room and sat down and we had a serious one on one interview. And I’d like to read you part of that.
Jamal 27:49
She explained why it’s so important to take care of the Amazon basin. “It is the pump the heart of the world.” She says “ll the major air flows come through here. Air travels all the way from Europe and Africa, and converges as it enters the central Amazon.” But she sees the world questioning conservation and jeopardizing all the victories that have been achieved in setting aside land. “I work hard for conservation,” she says, “but I lose sleep over wondering if I’m wasting my life. am I wasting my life? Is this a lost cause? I keep doing it because it’s the only thing I know to do.” She says she doesn’t believe she and her colleagues are doing their jobs with the urgency needed. We’re not telling the general public what is really going on. She said, having co edited a book with Lovejoy, and authored many peer reviewed scientific papers. Mesquita is a force to be reckoned with, but she personally feels inadequate when looking at the bigger picture. It is clear to her that we are nowhere near where we need to be. “I have zero pride and all my papers because we are preaching to the converted!” She says “What I want wants to do is talk to the outside world. I want to be able to just talk to people and tell them what is actually happening. We need to educate people about what is really going on with climate disruption.” Like so many of the experts I’ve spoken with for this book, mosquito believes the root cause of climate disruption is humanity’s lack of connection to the planet. “Even here in my Manaus, kids don’t understand that they live in the Amazon!” she says “So there is no connection at all with anything and that is the problem.” There is sadness in her voice as she tells me this. “I made a personal decision to not have kids because I don’t have a future to offer them. I don’t think we’re going to win this battle. I think we’re really done.”
Jesse C 29:54
You’re listening to a special feature on journalist Dahr Jamal speaking about climate disruption, his book, ‘The End of Ice’ 91.3 KBCS, your world of music and ideas. We take you back to the town hall Seattle presentation by Dr. Jamal on climate disruption. KBCS. 91.3.
Jamal 30:26
The last thing before we leave the Amazon is I need to mention, I want to read a short bit from a conversation I had with Dr. Lovejoy. The Amazon and tropical rain forests around the world are already so degraded, then instead of absorbing emissions, they’re now releasing more carbon annually than all of the traffic in the United States. In 2010, the Amazon drought released as much co2 as the total annual emissions of Russia and China combined. There’s 1.5 acres of rain forests lost every second. At some point in the not so distant future, the Amazon will regularly emit more carbon than and absorbs- yet another critical tipping point for Earth. So Dr. Lovejoy, like I said before, he’s very measured, quiet, stoic at times. And he wouldn’t talk a whole lot. He chose his words sparingly. And there was only one time of all the days in there that we were together, that I saw him really expressed strong emotion. And I was sat down with him it was it was during this interview that I’m going to read you this page from and he had pinned an op ed for the New York Times A long time ago. I mean, it was I think, almost 20 years ago, warning that we needed to keep Earth’s temperature from not going above, I think it was 1C at the time, we’re at 1.2(C) now and he- so he- you know we were talking about that. And I started talking about these other studies and projections, talking about what happens when we go to 2C, 3C 4C c, and I think it was right around 4C he slammed his his hand on the table and he said, people have no idea what’s going to happen when we hit 2C.
Jamal 32:38
“There are reasons other than moral concerns for protecting the Amazon including self interest. We go to the doctor and the pharmacy and we have no clue where our drugs came from.” Lovejoy says “more of that is from nature then we realize.” Lovejoy mentions a poison found in the Amazon that led to the proj- production of the pharmaceutical Captopril, which in turn became one of the first ACE inhibitors and is now used by hundreds of millions of people to control their blood pressure and heart conditions. Captopril widens blood vessels, making it easier for the heart to pump blood through them. Most of the people taking it have no idea that this drug responsible for their health is from the Amazon. He mentions another example- a vine found by indigenous people there. When they threw it in a leg all the fish came up to the surface gasping for air which made their fishing much easier. The name of the substance that causes this as Curare, it is used today as a muscle relaxant during major abdominal surgeries. His point is that if we continue to destroy the Amazon at our current pace, we may never know how it could help save millions or possibly billions of human lives in the future. Lovejoy believes that this is one of the least appreciated aspects of biodiversity. “The Amazon is a gigantic library of the lifestyle sciences which is continually acquiring new volumes.” He says “We are discovering new species of birds all the time. And wrapped up in all of that is incredible adaptation capacity. It’s important to remember each species represents a set of- a set of solutions to a set of biological problems. And any one of those can turn out to revolutionize how we understand biological science.” Lovejoy pauses engages admiringly at the jungle surrounding the camp, then turns back to me. “We are so stuck on ourselves. We don’t think we need any of it,” He says “we think we are some godlike thing.”
Jamal 34:49
It’s now far too late to avert global environmental catastrophe. 2018 was the fourth warmest year ever recorded. With the only warmer years being 2015, 2016 and 2017. We’re currently in the middle of what is on track to be the warmest decade ever. We are in the sixth mass extinction event that industrial civilization has caused. We’re injecting CO2 in the atmosphere at a rate 10 times faster than what occurred during the Permian mass extinction event. 252 million years ago, that annihilated 90% of life on Earth. Our current extinction rate is 1000 times faster than normal, is faster than that of the Permian mass extinction. But today, similar to what I experienced reporting from Iraq, people don’t want to know how deep the truth goes. The businesses usual economic paradigm continues. And there’s nothing to indicate that this is going to change and the radical way necessary to even bring about some mitigation. But the denialism is not just on the right, it’s not just fossil fueled. On the left, we have plenty of our own iterations. Last fall, the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released a report saying we had 12 years to avert global climate catastrophe. There was nothing new in that report. And in fact, last week, a study came out by several universities, showing that the IPCC, consistently soft selled (sold), the crisis that’s upon us, this on top of us knowing for a long time and this coming from several IPCC authors I interviewed myself, some of them are in this book, who told me off the record, that it’s heavily politicized, its lowest common denominator science, ie it’s not actually scientific process at all. And by the time the assessments come out, which is only every seven years, much of that information in them is at least 10 years old. One- I learned from one IPCC contributor recently, who said that you can essentially take the IPCC worst case projections and double them. But people pretend like we have 12 years still, then there’s a new Green Deal. Again, let’s switch everything over within 10 years, so that we can maintain some iteration of this economic paradigm, jobs, industry growth, etc, etc. And let me interject and say I am not be I am being critical of the sentiment behind these of the idea that there is still time. I am not being disparaging that these things shouldn’t happen, like the new Green Deal. Anything is good and helpful at this time. But I bring this up to just point out that the idea of that we still have time, or that we can still somehow maintain this mode of Western industrial civilization is not being honest. Other- the other examples of denialism are that somehow the 2020 election if if Trump gets booted out of the White House, that that’s going to help with the climate crisis. You know, the fact that- that a lot of these projections go to 2100 as though, some horrific impacts are already- are not already upon us. geoengineering, there’s going to be some techno fix. You know, there’s there’s been a lot of recent literature recently, even saying that they’re, some of the authors are hopeful, because there can be some sort of a geoengineering fix to this geoengineering crisis, which is specifically what it is. All of these, I think, are various forms of denialism that are steeped in not really seeing clearly and honestly, what’s happening, because none of these really take into account the fact that we are genuinely off the cliff, and every one of them is an attempt to fix something that’s not fixable. Already, the oceans have absorbed 93% of all the heat that humans have added to the atmosphere today, to give you an idea of how much energy that is: if they had not done so, our atmospheric temperature right now would be 97 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, we’d be well on our way to Venus. Today’s carbon dioxide levels at 412 parts per million co2 are already in accordance with what historically brought about a steady state temperature of 7C higher.
Jamal 39:48
We’re just waiting for the planet to catch up to the injury that’s been done. The oceans are now literally overheating, deoxygenated, and acidifying. Insects are essential for the proper functioning of all of our ecosystems, as they are food for other creatures, pollinators and recyclers of nutrients. Without insects, to put it simply, humans cannot survive. A recent series of studies informs us that at the current trajectory, we’re losing 2.4% of their biomass annually. If the current trajectory, assuming there is no acceleration- that’s a false assumption, but let’s just assume there’s no acceleration. There will be no insects in 100 years.
Jamal 40:41
Since just 1970, 60% of all mammals, fish, birds and reptiles are gone. What would we call it if there had been a 60% reduction of the entire human population since 1970. The IPCC worst case temperature scenario is 4-5C warming by 2100. The International Energy Agency stated that “preserving our current economic paradigm virtually guarantees a 6C rise in Earth’s average temperature before 2050. Shell and BP analysts expect the globe to be as much as 5 C warm-, 5C warmer than it is now by the middle of the century. I had written an article for Tom Engelhardt’s great website, www.tomdispatch.com, in 2013 titled “Are We Falling Off The Climate Precipice?” during which time I connected all the dots and really understood how far off the precipice we already were and even then, it was clear. But today, six years later, after having pin that article, a sober reading of all the latest climate change, science indicates that we are now virtually in freefall. We’re in a nonlinear sit- situation of climatic disruptions and their effects. We’re locked into a course of uncontrollable levels of climate disruption, bringing starvation, destruction, mass, migration, disease, and war, there can be no longer any question that life as we know it is ending.
Jamal 42:33
So this feeling in the room right now, after hearing all of that, what do we do with this? How are we going to be going into this, facing the real possibility of our own extinction?
Jamal 42:57
I think one of the biggest privileges of writing this book is the people that it brought me into contact with. And one of them was a Native American elder, a Cherokee medicine man named Stan Rushworth. And he reminded me of a very important distinction that has, at least up until today become a beacon of light for me and something that I hold on to when I am writing my dispatches, or giving a talk and come into this feeling of hearing all of that extremely intense information. And he pointed out how a very important distinction between rights and obligations, that Western colonialist mindset is that we have rights, what are my rights, but in indigenous thinking, they believe that we are born onto the planet with two primary obligations, one an obligation to serve and be good stewards of and take care of the planet-, excuse me. The second obligation is to make all decisions with the greatest care in order to take care of the future generations of all species. So when I get up each day, and look at what can be done, I find solace now in orienting myself around ‘what are my obligations? And how can I best serve those? How can I best carry those out?’ So are we not morally oblige now, to do everything possible, to serve and protect the Earth, no matter what, no matter how bleak things appear, no matter how intense, challenging and difficult, it’s going to become. Czech dissident writer and statesman Vaclav Havel said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing, no matter how it turns ou.” It is genuinely hard for me to see how humans make it through this. We- but we don’t know. Nobody knows, nobody can make any hard predictions on any of this. But what we do know is that we are in a hospice situation with much of life on Earth, including possibly our own species. Yet, like I said, given that we’ve never been here, we don’t know for sure what is going to happen. Hence, again, no matter how bleak it might appear, are we not morally obliged to do everything that we can to be good stewards of the planet, and to protect and serve and safeguard future generations of all species? I believe that each one of us has our own calling. I am not here to tell you what to do. I think anyone who tries to tell you they think they know for sure what to do, you should probably not listen to them. I think that each of our answers have to come from deep inside of ourselves.
Jamal 46:21
I- so one of the orienting facts for me, that has helped me reaching this point, and knowing what’s happening to the situation it actually came from. At one of the stories that Stan Rushworth, who I mentioned, shared with me which is in the book and I want to read it, it’s about a page because I want to be very, very specific and accurate about this. It’s an old story that was told to him by writer and storyteller, and indigenous elder Dr. Darrell ‘babe’ Wilson, who was born into the Pit River Nation tribe of northeastern California. Wilson tells of (Meese Meesa) a small but powerful spirit that inhabits (Aku Yet) ,what white people call Mount Shasta, located in the southern end of the Cascade Range in North Central California. Meese Meesa is a spirit force that balances the earth with the universe and the universe with the earth. Wilson says it Aku Yet is quote, “the most necessary of all the mountains upon Earth. For me, Meese Meesa keeps the earth the proper distance from the Sun, and keeps everything in its proper place. When wonder and power stir the universe with a giant yet invisible canoe paddle. Meese Meesa keeps the earth from wandering away from the rest of the universe. It maintains the proper seasons and the proper atmosphere for life to flourish as Earth changes seasons on its journey around the sun. The mountain, the story tells us, must be worshiped because Meese Meesa dwells deep within it. Climb the mountain with a pure heart, and with real resolve and to communicate with quote, “all of the light and all of the darkness of the universe is to place your spirit and a direct line from the songs of Meese Meesa to the heart of the universe. While in this posture, the spirit of man/woman is in perfect balance and harmony. For as long as Meese Meesa’s instructions are followed with sincerity, society will be maintained. its inhabitants will survive for the long term. Quote, “the most important of all of the lessons, It is said, is to be so quiet in your being that you constantly hear the soft singing of Meese Meesa. However, the story also warns that by not listening to Meese Meesa’s song, the song will fade. Meese Meesa will depart and the earth and all of the societies upon earth will be out of balance and the life there in vulnerable to extinction. I always wondered why a guy from Houston, Texas, who made his way up to Alaska just to be in the mountains- Why had I always been drawn by the siren song up into these places? And so I met Stan at the very end of working on the manuscript of this book, literally 10 days before the deadline. And he told me this story and then I knew I’ve always gone up into the mountains because that’s where I go to listen to the earth. And that’s where I go to listen to me Meese Meesa. And before I conclude, I’d like to read a prayer for the earth written by Stan Rushworth.
Jamal 49:52
Let us just see it simply enough to drink in springs radiance, the yellow scotch broom against Greenfield’s allow our eyes to reach into the morning like fingers into wet grass, our tears falling into April’s rain. We’ve been too long away. And the need is huge. Our desire unsteady in this time. Let the invisible wanting burst to the surface of our skin, where we may know this world who holds us so dearly, even in the middle of our blindness. And in the beginnings of our awakening. Let us lie face down in her beauty. Feeling her with our gratitude. She is waiting. And so I want to conclude with leaving you with two questions. Where do you go to listen to Meese Meesa? And when was the last time that you went there to listen? Thank you.
Shane 51:01
Thank you very much for that presentation. My name is Shane. I’m with Town Hall. We are going to have about 15 minutes to do a brief Q&A session. We have two microphones on the other side of the stage. If you have a question, feel free to come down and line up. We do ask that you- we are recording this evening and so between the recording and the audience, if you can just make sure you’re standing in front of the mic and speak clearly so everyone can hear your question. We also ask that you keep your questions short and concise. If you have a statement, if you can just make room for others who might have a question. And if we have time at the end, we can perhaps have you make a statement. But just be aware that there might be lots of folks who have questions this evening and we only have about 15 minutes. So on that note…
Crowd 1 51:49
Hi, are you familiar with the work of Jem Bendell?
Jamal 51:52
I am.
Crowd 1 51:53
Because that’s what’s inspired me the last couple of months, he uses a different word. He uses the word crowd climate tragedy, you know, deep adaptation, a map for navigating climate tragedy. And he says, I mean, I haven’t read it enough detail to know but I don’t think what he says is very much different from what you’ve been saying.
Jamal 52:15
That’s right. So Jem Bendell is doing very important work he’s talking about he’s written a paper called Deep adaptation that I would highly recommend people download and read, because he’s talking about the inevitable collapse of Western civilization. And that rather than trying to fix what’s happening, or try to mitigate it, both things, you know, can can have some value, he talks about adaptation to what is already baked into the system. So I definitely would highly recommend reading that
Crowd 2 52:56
Dahr, as a person that’s followed you for a while it’s a very pleasing to be have the opportunity to ask you a question, it seems to me that we are headed into a period and for wherever a person is on the political spectrum, that unsure- instead of having a choice between something is good and something is bad, we’re entering into an era where no matter where you are in the spectrum, we’re going to be at making a choice between what’s bad and what’s worse. And I’m concerned that we don’t have the ethical or moral philosophy to deal with these issues. And I wonder if this is a topic that you’ve thought about and what you have to say about it.
Jamal 53:36
And we have like nine minutes left? Well, I’ll cut to the chase the best I can.
Jamal 53:48
It’s clear. I mean, this government of this country is egregious insofar as: How could you be having a worse response/non response to the crisis, but even in the better countries? If you look at the scope of the crisis and what I shared with you, today- tonight, how would governments look if they were actually responding accordingly? You know, it would be full scale alert, let me just use a little micro example. So in the sea level rise chapter of the book, I interviewed Dr. Harold Wanless, a leading sea level rise expert at University of Miami, who again, I’m just going to cut to the chase. He basically said, it appears as though we have 130 feet of sea level rise baked into the system right now. So goodbye South Florida, not parts of it, all of it. So in his perspective, any government, any- any lawmaker that’s not ordering full scale evacuations, the government’s funding it the government’s running it in decommissioning the Turkey Point nuclear plant that’s just south of Miami at six feet elevation, instead, they’re adding another reactor to it right now. And remediating toxic waste zones and relocating museums and archives and hospitals and millions and millions and millions of people and finding different places for them to live on higher ground further up into the country. Any any politician that’s not pushing that is being criminally negligent. And so any government, any government that’s not reacting that way to this overall crisis, I think you could say the same thing. So that brings us to, again, it’s on us, what are we going to do individually? And what can we do in our own individual communities? And right now, we do have some time, here. If you’re in Paradise, California, you don’t, if you’re in the panhandle of Florida, you don’t. But we still have some time here to start working towards adaptation. So how am I going to adapt personally? How can I add my own little immediate community start working to adapt, and then if I’m lucky, get out into the city where I live? I think that’s where we’re at. And that’s something that we can do. And that’s something that we have agency over. And that we can all do, literally right now. And again, because if I look at the bigger picture, yeah, you might as well just throw your hands up, ‘eff it’ , what the hell, you know, but we don’t have to do that we don’t have to look at the bigger picture. Again, I come back to that moral obligation. And the Vaclav Havel quote, is, we still can do what we can do. And I’m going to just add in, you know, the student marches, the student walkouts. If I have to pause every time I just say that because I cry. Because if that doesn’t wake you up, and have you thinking and cooking about what am I going to do, if nothing else to support these kids, then you know, you need to go to the hospital and get, you know, something done with your heart. Because that- that is true inspiration. And you know, these kids are fearlessly doing what they can to tell the truth and to force the issue. So sorry for that tangent, but I just want to make sure I didn’t not bring that up tonight.
Crowd 2 57:17
I understand about no hope. And that but I have to keep working at it. And I run citizens climate lobby in Seattle. And we have bipartisan bill in the US House to put a price on carbon and dividends go directly back to the people. And the- we can cut the carbon, according to Mr. studies by 40% in 12 years. And do you think that’s possible?
Jamal 57:51
I don’t care if it’s possible, but we have to try.
Crowd 2 57:54
That’s where I’m at. But, you know, I just me concerned what the right way to go. But you know, this is I’ve been doing this for 10 years, I started with three groups, we now have 500 all over the United States, Canada, and internationally working on the same one idea, putting a price on carbon. So…
Jamal 58:17
No, thank you for that work! And I think everything counts, and everything matters. And you know, the only thing that is is is no good is not doing anything. I mean, I literally think you know, and I think it’s easy for people to get bogged down like “Well, I’m not directly involved in you know, something related to the climate” or “I’m not you know, being a hardcore enough activists”, but it’s it’s easy to forget, but so- whatever you do, we need doctors, we need gardeners we need- we need people doing everything that they do, and it all counts! And and I think that the key is for me is you know, what is my intention? And how is that taking care of these obligations that were born into this world with? So thanks for that.
Jesse C 58:59
That was journalist and writer Dahr Jamal speaking on climate disruption at a Seattle Town Hall, held in March 2019 at the Summit on Pike.
Jesse C 59:23
This has been the blend all in KBCS. This program is produced at our KBCS Studios on the Bellevue College campus. I’m Jessie Callahan. Stay with 91 three for Thom Hartmann at 9am. Democracy Now is up next on your station for music and ideas. 91.3 KBCS Bellevue, a listener supported public service of Bellevue College.