From Skinhead To Hero

There are stories that come along every once in a while that leave you speechless. We look at people and make sometimes educated, sometimes not so educated guesses about what is on their inside based on what is outside. In some instances, as with clothing, tattoos, things we do to our appearance, this process is intended. But every once in a while, what we see gives no hint at all of what is really underneath. And every once in a while we get a glimpse of how fluid we really are as humans, or can be, how we can begin as one thing and become something else. This man’s story is such a story.

This man, Bryon Widner, began as one of the worst racist skinheads. He was described by anti-skinhead movements as one of the most aggressive and confrontational. Then something changed. I don’t know if we will ever know what. I’m guessing that having kids may have had something to do with it. But he not only left the white power group he was in, but decided to speak out against them. He underwent multiple surgeries to remove his facial tattoos, after seeking help from one of his former enemies to get the surgeries. He received death threats against himself and his family. And still continued and spoke up.

I could expound on what kind of courage it takes to leave such a group, or speaking out against their terrorism, or even finally going to a group of people who were enemies and admitting you were wrong. But none of what I am relating conveys the extreme nature of his story or the magnitude of what he did in renouncing his status as completely as he did. None of this conveys the magnitude of what his wife did to support him, or what his family went through. So here is a more extensive article that still does not convey it, but it comes closer.

http://news.yahoo.com/reformed-skinhead-endures-agony-remove-tattoos-162205881.html

I am a cynic and a pessimist. I don’t watch the news because I get too angry. I’m not Anne Frank. I can’t say that I believe that there is good in everyone. But when someone like this comes along, I believe, at least for a little while, that maybe I’m wrong about that. Good luck, Mr. Widner and good luck to your family. I hope you find the peace that you seek. As far as I am concerned, you have earned it. You have made a transition from monster to hero in such a way that we find in myth and legend. And I hope that your message and what you have gone through will change the world. It has certainly changed my perspective of it today.

Emergency Experience for Writers

I’ve been working in emergency preparedness for about eight years now, and writing seriously for the past year and a half. Those worlds seem very separate and different. But they accent each other in unexpected ways sometimes.

I’m in a critique group called the Denver Fiction Writers,  and we critique each other’s work every Sunday, that we submitted the previous week. This work can be short stories or novel chapters. In my admittedly short experience writing, I still have some observations to make about necessities for all writers. One of them is research, research, research. This can be difficult sometimes, depending on what it is we need to research for our story.

Since the advent of the internet, research has become a billion times easier than in the old days of shadowing the world of the character you were writing about. Now if I want to write a story from the perspective of a one-armed radioactive chicken-plucker from Lithuania, it is almost certain that no matter how bizarre or specific the topic or point of view, someone somewhere has posted it on You-Tube or Wikipedia or some other address on the world wide web. The web truly is world-wide with possibly more data available to people’s fingertips in an hour, than people had access to in their entire lives a few decades ago. It began as a river of information that turned into an ocean. And it is one that I make use of as much as anyone. In fact, as I have recently discovered with my daughter, it is now acceptable for children to make use of it for science reports and other academic pursuits, it has become so mainstream. I remember when something you got off the internet ‘didn’t count’ for school research homework. Yes, I’m getting old.

However, one thing I have discovered is that nothing can replace the weight of actual experience. Whether or not a police officer is a good writer depends on the police officer and what he/she likes to do on the side, but the fact is that no one can write about police work with the same authority as someone who does it every day. Can writers run and try out for the police academy when they want to write a short story involving crime?  Not usually. However, there are fun things that one can do to increase experience not gained through reading on a computer. For that specific example, your local police station will tell you that you can go on ride-alongs in your district.

But one thing that has been indispensable in my job, and is available to anyone who wants to learn more about disasters or emergencies and the workings of the agencies who handle them, from public health, to local emergency management, is participating in exercises.

Most urban areas have them, and depending on the types of exercises, you don’t have to be a local responder to take part. Many of these exercises call for volunteer victims. If it is a decontamination exercise, you have the opportunity to get into your bathing suit and ‘be contaminated’ by whatever they have in the scenario, and then be deconned to assist the local hospital to figure out what to do with you. If it is a medical surge exercise, you have the opportunity to get made up like a zombie apocalypse victim or victim from a horror flick, complete with dripping gunshot or axe wounds, and let the local EMS transport you where the hospital then triages you. Or you can be a hysterical parent of one of the ‘victims’. In terms of the role-play, it’s like being in a grown-up game of Dungeons and Dragons, except far more real.

Last Friday, I participated in one of our local exercises, and one of my volunteer victims should have won an Oscar. I won’t go into the details of the exercise, but it dawned on me how valuable an experience that was, not only for us emergency preparedness and response folks, but also for citizens, and other people who want to get a sense of how the system works from the inside. It is a terrific and fun opportunity for writers to get to know local emergency response procedures and what things might look like in an emergency of various sorts.

So the next time you want to write about a disaster in your book, or even a local emergency, look up your local emergency management office. It’s something you should know anyway, since you should be familiar with your counties’ emergency operations plan. Their contact information is available on the internet. Or call your local police or sheriff’s office, sometimes they are one and the same in rural areas. Ask how to get involved in exercises as a volunteer in your area and help out emergency preparedness and response personnel, and get really cool experiences for your stories at the same time!

Terrorist Phobia

Ok, I’m trying not to be too political and ranty, but come on! I read this post from Facebook, and it’s like poking an angry lion with a sharp stick and a steak dangling on it. Here’s the post I read that’s got me a bit riled:

http://shebshi.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/some-real-shock-and-awe-racially-profiled-and-cuffed-in-detroit/

And here’s the AP account: http:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/sep/11/us-airline-passengers-detained/

Please visit this poor woman’s blog. She was basically a Middle-Eastern looking passenger, an American citizen and housewife coming home to her husband and kids, and she was taken off the plane in handcuffs along with two unrelated unsuspecting Indian passengers, for ‘suspicious activity’, suspicious activity being one of the unrelated men in her row going to the bathroom for too long. Things went as you might expect, in a conspiracy theorist’s worst nightmare, except it actually happened.

The airline in question was Frontier. I know, ‘What, really? Frontier?’ The last bastion of great customer service in airlines as far as I’m concerned, until this happened. So I’ve written the airline to complain. I don’t know that it will do any good, but unless people start saying something, the most bigoted voices are the loudest so far, and airline and airport and government policy will be ruled by the schoolyard bullies who cry ‘terrorist’ at anyone they don’t like. Unless someone calls people on their bullshit, stupid unreasonable claims of ‘suspicious activity’, and the hours or days of violated rights that come with it for the targets of such claims, will be accepted as normal adult behavior. Phobia will rule everyone’s actions.

I commented previously, that I’m sick and tired of fear of terrorism being used as an excuse for acting like, and I was going to say ‘shitheads’, but I used the word Nazis instead. I don’t mean the euphemism for someone who is just racist and acting like a jerk. I mean Nazi literally. This kind of surreptitious reporting of innocent people, and the violation of their rights with the excuse that it is for the good of others, is exactly how it started in Germany. And Herman Goering used the exact same tactics to get people to fall in line with the Nazi party, touting a standard of patriotism that involved suspicion of anyone not falling within a narrow definition of ‘German’. The Nazi party also encouraged policing one’s neighbors to prevent terrorism, though Goering didn’t use exactly the term terrorism because that is a 21st century catchphrase.

I think a lot of people don’t speak up against this garbage because we are all busy and in the back of our minds is the notion that everything will be fine, and ‘this can’t happen to me.’ Well, this woman never anticipated what happened to her either.

If you have been a Frontier customer, and feel moved by her story, I would recommend emailing their customer service, as a sometime passenger with what you expect of them, and what you don’t expect. Me, I’m Semitic, and my husband is Native American, and so collectively, we could look ethnic enough to be targeted, and I want to know if this is going to become a habit with them. If so, road trips are looking better and better, gas prices be damned!

Late Thoughts on 9/11

Since I’m not at the computer much on weekends, I don’t post unless I set it up ahead of time. And most of the time, I’m way too disorganized for that. So though the 10 year remembrance of 9/11 was yesterday, I’m posting today, because it was very much on my mind.

I worked in Tower Two about four years before 9/11 happened. It was a part time position, annotating social science articles for the National Development and Research Institute, Inc., on the 15th floor. I think it was the 15th floor. I don’t completely remember, it was almost fifteen years ago now. I didn’t spend much time there. I annotated the articles and brought them in twice a week, and talked with my manager, J.B. O’Kane. The job gave me something social science-related that I could put on a graduate school application. And J.B. O’Kane wrote me a recommendation.

A year later, I received a scholarship to attend Arizona State University’s medical anthropology program, based on, among other things, those recommendations. It is quite possible that if I hadn’t gotten into school as I did, I may still have been working there, part or full-time when 9/11 happened.

When 9/11 happened, I had graduated with a masters in medical anthropology, and had been working for a year at the Maricopa County health department as an epidemiologist. I got a call as I was getting up to go to work. My director said, “Oh my God, you have to come in! Are you coming in soon? Something terrible has happened. We need everyone to come in. Someone just flew planes into the World Trade Center.” At that time, everyone watching knew that this was not an accident. It was an intentionally caused disaster. Health departments in most places had been training for bioterrorism response. So were activated when this happened, because no one knew yet how coordinated this attack was, or when, if, or where the next attack would happen. We spent the next few weeks doing enhanced syndromic surveillance of the hospitals and medical offices to identify any rise in any kind of symptoms. That’s the short answer for what syndromic surveillance is, monitoring flu-like illness, GI illness etc to see if we can identify a rise in symptoms before an epidemic occurs.

And I thought about J.B. O’Kane in those days and weeks. I wouldn’t have been doing that surveillance, that job at that time if it hadn’t been for him. Whether I still would have been at the WTC is impossible to determine, but his recommendation was partly responsible for my grad school opportunity and the job opportunity in public health that followed. In the days and weeks afterward, I did multiple and complex internet searches through every engine I could find. Nothing turned up for either NDRI, or J.B. O’Kane personally. And I couldn’t look them up by address anymore. In the years that followed, I still did searches occasionally, wondering if being on one of the lower floors could have saved at least some of them.

Most of my college friends still live in New York. And they told me that at the train stations, they would start marking the tires of cars with cut marks, because chalk washes off in the east coast rain. After a couple weeks of cut marks, they knew that the owner of a car wasn’t coming back to pick it up. And I sometimes find myself wondering if my supervisor’s car was one of those.

Sometimes people say, “Oh did you know someone who was killed?” I say, “I don’t know,” thinking about him. But I do know that if you lived in the tri-state area, then you either knew someone, or you knew someone who knew someone. Hundreds of people were killed. And years later, there are people still turning up who have COPD, or emphysema, or respiratory distress otherwise incurable, as young as thirty years old because if they weren’t first responders, they worked nearby, or lived nearby, or were on the street and handed out water, trying to help nearby.

And those deaths weren’t the only ones that day. America died, at least the America that we all grew up with or were taught existed. Maybe it never did. No one will really know for decades, until historians have a long view, and ‘secure documents’ are unsecured because the people who kept the secrets die of old age. Maybe the terrorists knew what would happen if they committed such an act, while someone like George W. Bush was in office. Maybe they predicted that he would pursue a course of expediency to rid his administration of inconvenient tyrants, instead of actually investigating the party responsible for the 9/11 massacre. Maybe they anticipated that some fundamentalist factions within the U.S. would, like Herman Goering, use the blanket of ‘national security’ as carte blanche to chip away at the personal freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights. It is a terrible irony that while our dedicated men and women in service were diverted to protect our freedom, our freedoms were being eaten away from the inside out.

Perhaps the terrorists knew that the most efficient way to destroy us would be to erase trust, that elimination of trusting your neighbor was the quickest way to choke a real democracy. Instillation of fear of the ‘other’ allows fertile ground for lies, for groups with their own agenda to present a solution of safety and ‘security’ that was never possible, and has never existed. That is, after all, the definition of terrorism, using fear to tear apart. We gave them our fear, as demanded, acted against our neighbor because of it, let it change the way we thought and lived and experienced the world. And this ‘solution’ for security, like all other such solutions in history was merely a policy of thinly veiled institutional bigotry based on creed or ethnicity, or even the perception of ethnicity or religion, something the U.S. was supposed to be against.

That day, and every day since, when a hate crime is committed against a middle eastern person or Muslim person in the U.S., or someone even perceived to be, the terrorists have won. Every day that someone is detained without formal accusation or trial, every day someone is violated by the Patriot Act, the terrorists have won. Every day that we bankrupt ourselves further to fight amoeboid and ever-shifting ‘wars on terror’ on multiple fronts, instead of putting our money into educating the next generation of leaders in public schools and colleges now, the terrorists have won. Every day that one of our own populations dies of a preventable disease or starves for want of the tax money we have squandered on fear-based measures of ‘security’, the terrorists have won.

There is no denying that there is a threat. But it is simply not possible to eliminate all risk. Life is risk. What we do know is that because of these policies and decisions, people of the lower income brackets suffer and die from lack of health care, people lose their health because they lose their homes and the ability to put food on the table, and methods of interrogation that were once ruled as torture, by us, are now being used and rationalized, by us. Our democracy has changed, and our society is transforming into the terrorists’ vision of us.

I remember that when I was growing up, I was a bitchy teenager. But underneath it all, I think that there was an optimism I would never have admitted to anyone who asked, that I lived in a time and in a country that really made almost anything possible. Our generation was painfully self-absorbed, and you could hear it in the music of the 80s especially. But, I am still glued to that music like a shipwrecked person to a floating chunk of flotsam because it also contained a hope for the possibilities of the future, a deep-rooted belief in the legacy that we were inheriting, of a country that had gotten something right. It really was a land of freedom and opportunity and good intentions from most of the people most of the time. We had our flaws, for sure, but we were working on them. And ultimately, I think that we believed that things would be okay.

I no longer believe that, I am sorry to say. I don’t know if average citizens like me will be mobilized to turn things around, and create enough perspective to get us headed the right way again. I don’t even know what we could do. I just know that the America now is not the same America I grew up with. Maybe I’m naive. I know I am. But I think that loss of freedom, and even the loss of optimism and hope is one of the more profound casualties of 9/11. So when I mourn the deaths, it’s not just for the people dead, but for the people hurt, and for the casualties in our way of life that seem to keep coming. I mourn my failure as a person during these years to do anything as a citizen to change the train wreck course we seem to be on.

But as a child of the 80s, I guess I still hope, and still search. The music is still playing, so there’s still time to change things and learn from our mistakes. An idea is too powerful a thing to ever go away. We see that with negative ideas all the time, why not positive ones? As long as the idea of America and the idea of democracy the way that Thomas Jefferson envisioned it is still remembered, I think that we still have a chance to recover.