Over the years, we faced a lot of hard times, but perhaps the most difficult challenge was the ten-year struggle to share food in San Francisco. On August 15, 1988, nine of us were arrested for sharing food without a permit. We’d written the city requesting a permit, but after a number of failed attempts to get an answer, we started sharing food at the entrance to Golden Gate Park. Over forty riot police came out of the woods and surrounded our table, arresting those of us they saw giving away the food. The San Francisco Police made nearly 100 arrests that month but stopped when Mayor Art Agnos issued us a permit.The next summer the police started arresting the homeless in an effort to drive them from the city. Believing we were providing encouragement to the homeless, the mayor had the Health Department suspend our permit and the Recreation and Parks Department deleted the permit to share food in city parks. The mayor’s office also took us to court, and we were ordered to stop sharing food and literature until we had a permit. We were arrested another 100 times until October 5, 1989, at 5:00 p.m., when the Loma Prieta earthquake rocked the Bay Area. That evening, instead of the police arresting us, they joined us for dinner.
All was well until after the election when the former chief of police, Frank Jordan, became mayor. He had run an anti-homeless campaign, and after he entered office, he started Operation Matrix and started arresting the homeless again. Food Not Bombs worked with the American Civil Liberties Union to document the abuse of the homeless, and we videotaped the police sweeps, capturing the confiscation of blankets, shoes, and other personal belongings, and the arrest of people for living outside. After one of our videos was aired on an Oakland TV station, the mayor ordered our arrest. This time we were charged with felony conspiracy to violate a court order to stop feeding the hungry. During the next three years, we were arrested over 700 times. The police often beat us, and on several occasions they tortured our volunteers. We organized a program where community groups, unions, and churches were invited to risk arrest one day a month. This helped us extend our campaign. In 1994, I was arrested under the new California Three Strikes law and faced twenty-five years to life. In all, I spent over 500 nights in jail. I was beaten thirteen times and tortured three times where my ligaments and tendons were ripped and I was placed in a small four-by-four-foot wire cage for three or four days. After the police smashed a club into my face, I had to have two surgeries to rebuild my tear ducts and sinuses. During this time, we would be arrested even when we weren’t sharing food, adding to the stress. Our vehicles were towed and our equipment destroyed. The police also organized smear campaigns trying to discredit us, claiming we were rich and that our food was dirty and spoiled. The police infiltrated our group and tried to pit one member against another. One volunteer was so upset by the pressure he killed himself. The San Francisco Police wiretapped our home phones and followed our every move. Amnesty International declared our convicted volunteers “prisoners of conscience” and the United Nations Human Rights commission started an investigation into the human rights abuse against our volunteers. Finally, the city agreed to stop the prosecutions and the arrests. This had to be one of the most stressful times ever for my family and me. Even though the city spent millions of dollars trying to stop us, we not only continue to feed people in San Francisco to this day but people all over the world were inspired to start their own Food Not Bombs group in their community. So, while it was difficult, it was worth it. After the city stopped the arrests, many people expressed their gratitude. For some people the fact that we never gave up gave them great hope.
The most effective way to encourage people to support the ideas of Food Not Bombs is to set up a table and start sharing meals. The impact on people is powerful. When I was staffing a literature table in Tucson, Arizona, a woman with several children came up and told us that when she was homeless in Sacramento, California, she ate with Food Not Bombs. She regained her self-respect because of the way the volunteers at Food Not Bombs had treated her and her children. She said if it wasn’t for Food Not Bombs, she might not have ever gotten off the streets, and she gave us $20.
There have been a number of times when someone visited our table and argued that a war is just or that homeless people should just get a job, and we spoke respectfully with them, sharing our ideas along with our food, and several years later they returned to say that something had happened to them and now they understand what we were talking about. A number of soldiers have been very angry with us, but when they return from war they tell us that they support our work and that war is wrong.
In 1989 I was arrested outside a developer’s party at the University of California–San Francisco for “singing Christmas carols without a permit.” The officer talked with me as he drove me to jail to spend the night locked up, and he asked me several questions about why we were singing outside this party. That summer the officer came to our table in Civic Center Plaza looking for me. He told me that our trip to jail made a big impression and he retired from the force that morning. He gave us a $20 bill, thanked us for our work, and waved goodbye.
JOHN McLAUGHLIN
Musically Speaking
John McLaughlin is, unquestionably, one of the greatest musicians alive and a pioneer of what has come to be called “world music.” His compositions are mind-bogglingly expansive and nonconformist, going beyond the boundaries of jazz, rock, and other established genres. To me, he has always seemed to express something deeper than music itself. Students and admirers of his work, who number in the many millions worldwide, often report feeling the same way.
John grew up in Yorkshire, England, and began playing the guitar when just a lad. In the sixties, he moved to the United States and worked with Miles Davis’s electric group, among others. During this time he began exploring Indian culture, music, and religion and went on to found his own acoustic group, Shakti, which included many notable Indian musicians. John is a gentle, charitable, and kind person with a particular love of animals and concern for war-affected children. He is a fascinating man, but so reserved that I am very happy to have him open up to readers about what he believes music contributes to life. In my book, literally and figuratively, if anyone should know, it’s John McLaughlin.
Music is a language. A language without words, but nevertheless a language. Music speaks about the human condition, about the relationships we have with the beings in this world and the Universe itself. Most of these subjects are actually unspeakable in words, though the poetic form is the closest form of speech to music, but can be obliquely or sometimes directly indicated in music. I believe that music is a language of the spirit, and as such has definitely encouraged me to pursue my research into the fundamental questions of existence.
I am often asked where my motivation or my desire comes from. This is essentially unanswerable. It’s like asking “where does awareness come from?” My particular musical conceptions, however, can be traced to two aspects: my cultural upbringing, and my innate tendencies, neither of which are conscious choices we make at birth, unless you believe in karmic choice. Regarding my innate tendencies I can say nothing. Regarding my cultural background, I’m very fortunate in having elder brothers who influenced me from childhood. Philosophically and musically, I owe a large debt to them both. They encouraged me to question everything, including the ultimate questions about life itself. My mother, an amateur violinist, also encouraged me to broaden my outlook in many ways, not only in music. These were, and still are, determining influences in my life. For example, I recall one winter evening when my mother showed me the planet Mars from our window, and then she gave me a copy of The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I was about twelve or thirteen years old at the time. This was just one small event out of many that shaped my particular character.
Part of that character is my endless hope for humanity. How can you not have hope for us? It is our natural state. We are all already on this path, this journey, and always have been, the same place we set out for when we came down from the trees. The spiritual masters say w
e already are headed for enlightenment, and always were; we just haven’t realized it yet. Yet, even though we have hope, it needs translating into action. We all have responsibility for each other. I believe we are all confronted by similar problems. There are millions of people, however, who don’t have the luxury of considering anything other than how they will survive this day. And, of course, many don’t.We in the West, on the other hand, are blessed with many more opportunities that give us the possibility of considering personal transformation. Since we all have weaknesses that need transforming, we have a greater chance of accomplishing this. I don’t need to list our weaknesses since we all know what they are if we are honest with ourselves: Egotism, hatred, indolence, selfishness, greed, the list is endless.
Not everything can be overcome with music, not all our foibles will disappear if we learn to play the guitar or the tabla, but I will say that learning a musical instrument is very healthy, even for amateurs. You get a quick and humbling experience when learning to play an instrument, and in diving deeply into music, you learn also that you know next to nothing. That’s a very important experience, in my opinion! And there are so many lovely pieces of music in our world, from Mozart to Miles Davis; this list is not endless, but long. The wonderful thing about music is that people love music, whatever the style. Music speaks to us directly and reminds us where we all belong, and that we all belong together.
ARTHUR MINTZ
The Soul with the Soles
Arthur Mintz is a retired photographer who lives with his wife, Marjorie, in Saratoga. I read about Arthur’s adventure in a newspaper one morning and was so captivated I called him immediately! As it turns out, I got him out of bed (he was on the other coast: Saratoga, California, not Saratoga, New York); the sun hadn’t yet risen on his day. When he’d had his breakfast, I called again to ask him about the odd cargo he had hauled in gunnysacks to South America.His story is so simple and lovely that I wanted it to be retold in this book.It shows that if you look about you, there is always something you can do to reduce discomfort in the world.
It all started with this fellow, a missionary for Medical Ambassadors, who lives down the street from our house and is a friend of ours. He used to go back and forth to Venezuela, taking doctors and supplies to the villages there. My wife and I love to travel, so it crossed my mind that it might be enjoyable to tag along with him, take photos of the wildlife, that sort of thing. We flew to Caracas with him, then took a small plane into the interior. From there, we traveled by dugout canoe for about twelve hours to the little village of Los Gar-citas. The journey along the water was wonderful. There were birds everywhere. At one point, we witnessed flocks of white herons on the embankment, looking for fish because the river had overflowed, taking the fish with it. There must have been over 1,000 of them! I took lots of pictures.
We arrived in Los Garcitas to find a small village of houses with tin roofs and mud floors. The people are poor, mostly banana farmers, and the women use an old foot-pedal Singer sewing machine to make clothes. Almost no one wears shoes, but I didn’t think much of it until, sitting at lunch, one of the doctors pointed out a child who was wearing shoes. He said, “See that child? Shoes are very important. Most of the diseases the children get come from bacteria and parasites entering their bodies through the soles of their bare feet.” I thought about that. It was most unusual to see a village child with shoes. Back home in California, not only did the children all have shoes but they didn’t wear out the shoes, they grew out of them. And the shoes they discarded still had a lot of use in them.When I returned to the States, I put the word out, using some of my photographs of the barefoot village children. There was instantly a great outpouring of shoes of all kinds and sizes. I went across the street to the coffee company and got seven gunny sacks that the coffee beans came in, and filled them with shoes!
When we returned to Venezuela, we hit a snag. The Customs agents wouldn’t let us take the shoes in to their country. I didn’t speak the language and couldn’t get anywhere with them. I suspected some sort of scam on their part, but there was nothing I could do to make them listen. Luckily, my friend and neighbor speaks fluent Spanish. He can also talk like a Dutch uncle, so he rattled off arguments to the inspectors at full blast, giving them no chance to answer back. Within fifteen minutes the shoes were cleared and we were waved past with a cheery, “Welcome to Venezuela.”
When we reached the village, we couldn’t just leave the shoes in a pile or there would have been a mad scramble. Instead, we had the children come to us, one at a time, so we could fit them properly with a pair of shoes and sent them on their way. Their faces lit up like Christmas trees! A few children got sports shoes that lighted when their feet hit the ground. They couldn’t believe it. One child’s foot was badly diseased, so rotted away, that the bone was showing through the flesh. He chose his shoes and then we carried him to the doctor’s office and sat him in a chair. The dead flesh was cut away from his foot, antibiotics were applied, and his foot was bound up. All that time, no matter what was being done to his foot, he wasn’t about to let go of those shoes.
I know that some parents took the shoes and sold them to buy food, but no matter, even that meant some difference had been made in their lives. If you ask me what comes to mind about this little act of caring, I will offer you Jesus Christ’s words: “Do unto others . . . .”
MOBY
We Are All Made of Stars
The title of this essay comes from a Moby hit that he wrote in memory of the air attacks on the World Trade Center on his birthday, September 11. While it has other meanings, this title seems to sum up the potential for all of us to become something special. Moby, whose real name is Richard Melville Hall—his nickname comes from the tale of the white whale, written by his great-great-great uncle—lives his life by doing what moves him. He doesn’t follow trends, but creates music that often goes against them. Because of this, his early years weren’t easy ones, but he never gave up on himself or gave into pressure, and through this tenacity he helped revolutionize dance music. Since then, he has changed up his music as his own interests and tastes evolved, again, unconcerned with the commercial viability of following his vision.
Moby is understated: a diminutive, humble (he calls himself “a simpleton”), bald, and somewhat quizzical-looking man with big glasses. He dresses down, lives in a modest apartment, and leads a quiet life. He shows that going against the grain can often be the key to making a difference.
I grew up very poor in a very wealthy town (Darien, Connecticut), so my biggest goal back then was to do my best to make sure people did not notice how poor I was. A whole laundry list of people and things influenced me, all the way from when I was a child. For a start, although this isn’t the whole list, there’s punk rock, Christ, Pete Seeger, John Robbins (John Robbins refused his inheritance of the Baskin Robbins ice cream fortune because he thinks dairy is poison and dairy farming is cruel to animals), good public school teachers, and my mom.
My mother was a Pantheist, in that she liked just about everything. As for my religion, when I was sixteen years old I embraced Taoism because I had a crush on a young woman who was into Taoism, but I didn’t really look seriously into religion until I was in my early twenties. I still don’t think of myself as a religious person, although I love the teachings of Christ. I find most institutional religion bureaucratic and secular. Any religious belief or teaching that is not based on humility and compassion should be looked at very skeptically and warily.
Two words, labels really, that I try to avoid are “spiritual” and “creative.” I don’t know why, but these words make me uncomfortable. Maybe because they try to encapsulate things that are un-encapsulatable. And oftentimes people who describe themselves as “spiritual” and “creative” tend to be kind of smug. So, even though I’m smug once in a while, I avoid those words!
If I could offer any advice to someone about making their business life count for something, I’d give them the deathbed question
. Very simply, what do you want to remember when you’re on your deathbed? This is a question that should guide all of our actions and choices. Have your own standards. No one on their deathbed wants to say to themselves: “I worked for forty years at a job that I hated because it was expected of me and made my parents happy.”
One Can Make a Difference Page 15