graphic: photo, Ron and Diane Elliott, Shenandoah 2000 Galleries, Shenandoah Valley, VA "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and study it." Rabbi Hillel "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?" "In the 1930s, more than 7,000 Jews lived in West Virginia. Today, just 2,000 remain in a state of 1.8 million -- an overwhelmingly Christian, Bible Belt state. Jews helped develop the state's economy, arriving as pack peddlers and setting up shops in coal-camp towns in the early 1900s. They flourished for a half-century until the mines were mechanized and jobs lost. Then people left in droves for easier, more lucrative work in other states. Unlike other Appalachian states, though, West Virginia had no big cities where Jews could migrate. Its two largest towns, Charleston and Huntington, have populations of about 60,000. The Jewish communities, small to begin with, were hard-hit by the exodus, which continued in the '80s when the coal industry fell on hard times. And still the numbers dwindle.... Rabbi Julie Spitzer, now director of the Greater New York Council of Reform Synagogue, once led the Williamson congregation, driving five hours each way to get there from Hebrew Union. 'There's a wonderful spirit that you might think would be beaten down with so many seeming hardships -- maintaining the community both financially and in terms of numbers,' she says. 'In spite of all of that, there really is a commitment. It's much harder to find in a large city, where you can take a Jewish community for granted, where you can choose to belong or not belong.' In Beckley, a town of about 20,000 some 300 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., the Yellow Pages list more than 100 churches -- and one temple. Crowson conducts her services largely in English, reserving Hebrew for most of the songs and about half of the prayers. 'In Hebrew, the sound of it makes them feel part of something,' she explains. 'In English, they do more than feel. They understand what they're saying, and they're connected.' Rabbi Julie Schwartz, who oversees Hebrew Union's student rabbi program, says students like Crowson travel to their congregations every other weekend for a stipend of about $350. The other $150 covers travel expenses. 'They cram a lot into a weekend,' Schwartz says. They attend Shabbat dinners and services on Fridays and havdallah suppers welcoming the new week on Saturdays. They run Hebrew lessons for children and religion classes for adults. They visit shut-ins." -- New York Times, March 1999 "Great improvisors are like priests. They are thinking only of their god." -- Stephane Grappelli, musician graphic: Wise Woman, mixed media fabric wallhanging by Margaret Gregg, Mill Creek Studio, Limestone, TN "Ask a roomful of female executives about their experiences working in male-dominated Silicon Valley and every one will have a litany of grievances. "Anita Borg, president of the Institute for Women and Technology, says she is constantly battling 'the assumption that women don't know what they're talking about.' Dina Bitton, CEO of Integrated Data Systems, cites surveys that show that while women start nearly 30 percent of all companies in Silicon Valley, they receive only 1.6 percent of the funding.... "But the one common complaint of prominent women in Silicon Valley is that, while they are trying to develop and promote exciting new technologies, the media remains obsessively and single-mindedly focused on their looks and their gender.... "Roizen will probably never be able to lose the former cheerleader tag, just as Polese hasn't been able to shake the 'former dancer' moniker. Venture capitalist Ann Winblad will always be remembered as the diminutive 'former girlfriend of Bill Gates,' despite her own achievements. After a series of controversial CrossWorlds ads featured her posing in a cocktail dress, Katrina Garnett will always be seen as the cleavage queen. And even technology pundit Esther Dyson will probably always be notorious for the fact that she isn't typically feminine: Entire magazine articles (like a feature in Metropolis) have been dedicated to the shocking mess that is her office, and countless articles have felt the need to play up the fact the she only wears mail-order jeans.... "Anita Borg says she would like to see just a few stories that focus on a woman's business skills or technical prowess, instead of the fact that she's a woman: 'You don't hear about women who are inventing stuff. The whole point of my institute is expanded visions of the future of the industry. I've only had one article that mentioned that at all.' Her press clippings bear out the charge -- although she has been featured in prominent publications like Business Week ('Why Women Are So Invisible in Technology'), Internet World ('Women Use Web to Crack the Glass Ceiling') and the Los Angeles Times ('Gender Gap Goes High Tech'), most stories only passingly discuss the engineering achievements of her years in research and development. Instead, they play her up as a woman who is bucking the patriarchy.... "Most importantly, many of these women are also actively working to increase the number of women in the industry -- through projects like Borg's institute's efforts to increase women's influence on the development of new technologies, or Garnett's Backyard Project, which encourages young girls to learn about technology. This, in the end, might be the only way to divert the spotlight from their gender...." -- Janelle Brown, Beauty and The Geeks: Female Technology Execs Face Cruel Choices, Salon Magazine "To give citizens a choice of ideas is to give them a choice of politics. If a nation has narrowly controlled information, it will soon have narrowly controlled politics." -- Ben Bagdikian, on centralized corporate control of the news Women's Platform, La Raza Unida Party Program -- "... A. We shall respect the right of self-determination for our women to state what their specific needs and problems are, and how they feel that these needs can be met and these problems can be eliminated, as a basic princple of our party. B. The party encourages La Raza women to meet in Raza women's groups wherever the movement is functioning, in order to enable the women to discuss the direction that their participation is taking and the particular needs of Raza women they feel must be acted upon. We encourage that these groups be formed to enable the women to aid in the recruitment of more women to participate in a politically conscious way and in all levels of the struggle. C. The party will include Raza women in all decision-making meetings, paying them due respect when they offer opinions and speak. Our women will always be fairly represented in planning committees, in public relations functions as spokeswomen, in workshops, and in discussion groups as leaders. D. Raza men and women both will cooperate fully, in this party and at home, in the very difficult task we have before us of freeing our women and encouraging them in every way we can, at all times, to become involved in every level of the struggle and in working actively towards the elimination of all attitudes and practices that have relegated our women to the unquestionably bondaged positions they are now in...." "Out of our regard to them [the Delawares] we gave them two Blankets and Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect." -- William Trent, 1763 "Under Lemkin's definition, genocide was the coordinated and planned annihilation of a national, religious, or racial group by a variety of actions aimed at undermining the foundations essential to the survival of the group as a group. Lemkin conceived of genocide as 'a composite of different acts of persecution or destruction.' His definition included attack on political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of the group. Even nonlethal acts that undermined the liberty, dignity, and personal security of members of a group constituted genocide if they contributed to weakening the vitality of the group. Under Lemkin's definition, acts of ethnocide- a term coined by the French after the war to cover the destruction of a culture without the killing of its bearers-also qualified as genocide." -- Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn in American Holocaust, Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, pp. 279-280, David Stannard, Oxford University Press, in reference to coinage of the term "genocide" by Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, 1944. "Politics is about the grievances; poetry is about the grief." -- Robert Frost "First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the communists and I did not speak out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me." -- Pastor Martin Niemoller, a victim of the Nazis

graphic: Street Festival, NSF, Jonesborough, TN

Newspaper Association of America has links for local newspapers, most of which list names, postal and e-mail addresses of state and local representatives.

Quotes on the state of the union

• "What does low unemployment mean for the wages of the average American worker? From 1992 to 1998 the unemployment rate dropped by more than a third, yet the real hourly compensation of American workers remained virtually unchanged. Far from threatening to ignite inflation, workers' real wage increases have failed even to keep up with improvements in their productivity. Indeed, since 1973 the hourly compensation of workers would have to have grown by 24 percent more than it has (amounting to an increase in wages for the average full-time worker of more than $6,000 a year) just to match the gains that have taken place in worker productivity.
  "Opinion surveys asked a sample of Americans to estimate the rate of unemployment in 1996, when it stood at about 5.3 percent -- close to what many economists consider to be "full employment." The respondents' answers put the unemployment rate at about 20 percent, adding to concern among economists about the sorry state of public awareness about the economy. But perhaps the public was thinking of employment as the ability to be independent and earn a decent living. If so, the estimate of 20 percent of Americans without employment more accurately captured the real picture." -- John E. Schwarz, The Atlantic Monthly
• "American Demographics recently polled a group of young people to see how they ranked this county's top problems. The top answer came back as 'greed.' A look at some economic data helps illustrate why they may think that way. Median family income in the United State grew 37 percent between 1949 and 1959. By 1960 it had grown 41 percent, but during the next two decades it grew 6.8 percent. Since 1979, 97 percent of the median family income growth has gone to 20 percent of families in the U.S. In the 1970s the top 1 percent of the people in the United States had 13 percent of the wealth. By 1995 the top 1 percent held 38.5 percent of the wealth...." -- Kingsport Times-News, April 14, 1999
• "...Total global expenditures for malaria research in 1993, including government programs, came to $84 million. That's paltry when you consider that one B-2 bomber costs $2 billion, the equivalent of what, at current levels, will be spent on all malaria research over twenty years. In that period, some 40 million Africans alone will die from the disease. In the United States, the Pentagon budgets $9 million per year for malaria programs, about one-fifth the amount it set aside this year to supply the troops with Viagra. For the drug companies, the meager purchasing power of malaria's victims leaves the disease off the radar screen. As Neil Sweig, an industry analyst at Southeast Research Partners, puts it wearily, 'It's not worth the effort or the while of the large pharmaceutical companies to get involved in enormously expensive research to conquer the Anopheles mosquito.'..." Millions for Viagra, Pennies for Diseases of the Poor by Ken Silverstein in The Nation, July 19,1999
• "Because most of the country is doing well, and because of the residential and employment patterns that have emerged in the last few decades, most Americans never see the areas of extreme economic distress, and don't encounter their fellow citizens who are struggling.... The problems of America's cities are not limited to the cities. They have bled into the suburbs and they are evident in many areas of chronic economic distress, including Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta region and many of the nation's Indian reservations -- places Mr. Cuomo refers to as 'economic flatliners.' If those problems are not forcefully addressed when the national economy is strong and budget surpluses are huge, said Mr. Cuomo, then when?" -- Unmasking Poverty, review by Bob Herbert of "Now Is the Time: Places Left Behind in the New Economy" by Andrew Cuomo, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, New York Times, April 5, 1999
• "The Senate again rejected a proposed $1 increase in the minimum wage on March 25th when they voted down a resolution offered by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA). Members voted mainly along party lines, but Sens. Arlen Specter (R-PA) and Gordon Smith (R-OR) crossed over to vote for the resolution, while Sens. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Bob Graham (R-FL) opposed it. The $1 dollar increase would bring the federal hourly requirement up to $6.15 an hour -- only a small improvement in the current minimum wage which still keeps many full-time workers living below the poverty level. The majority of minimum wage workers are women.

  "At the same time, reports from food banks around the country report an increased demand for help, coming from growing numbers of working poor people and senior citizens. Rep. Tony Hall (D-OH) released the findings of a survey of 117 food banks which also note that they are receiving fewer donations." -- National Organization for Women, April 5, 1999

"Declaration of Independence" -- Amended and approved July 4, 1776, by representatives from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia "....We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security...."

How did I get here anyway? -- Take me to Appalachia

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Original material © A Country Rag April, 1999. All rights reserved.