DATE LINES
Zimmerman, Joy Ann & Fox., Carol & Conrow, Joan & Kroeber, Arthur R.
DATA LINES An Organizer's Organizer CORTE MADERA, CALIFORNIA "I learned quite a bit from studying Gandhi, but the first practical steps I learned from the best organizer I know, Fred Ross. He...
...But Mehta is optimistic...
...The law also sets strict guidelines for deciding when amniocentesis may be used to detect genetic defects...
...The social implications of sex-selection are disastrous...
...They helped more than 30,000 Hispanics gain U.S...
...As Peter Barry, former minister for foreign affairs, says, "We trust our friends not to insult us by ignoring our guidelines...
...However, the insulting has raged rampant...
...They are mainly U.S...
...Many doctors defend the practice as a way of keeping family size down in a country with a desperate population problem...
...We will give life back to the land," says Makanani, "and the land will give life back to us...
...Traditionally, women just kept bearing children— whether two, five, or ten—until at least one son was produced...
...One state has already banned the tests, and Parliament may follow suit with national legislation...
...I am extremely happy that the bill against amniocentesis was passed," says Dr...
...Conyng-ham, an American destroyer capable of carrying three antisubmarine-rocket nuclear missiles, sailed into Cork Harbour in Ireland...
...Hundreds of foreign warships in the midst of military exercises and at least six nuclear-capable ships and a nuclear ammunition ship have visited Irish harbors over the past few years...
...But Ross persuaded him that the people in the barrios of East L.A...
...The hope of the antinuclear groups is that they can build up so much grass-roots support for the bill that it will be unstoppable...
...Canada's rationale parrots the U.S...
...Then war broke out, growers gained more power as providers of food for America's soldiers, and Ross suspected his antigrower sentiments would no longer be tolerated...
...Deven Mehta, head of the clinic's sex-selection program, says about forty-five couples have used his service since 1986...
...It's not ours to give up...
...In Bombay alone, almost 300 clinics offered the service early this year...
...I took one valley," says Ross, "and Cesar took another...
...Hawaii Governor John Waihee is a former member of the Ohana...
...His first morning in camp, he set out early to visit as many workers' tents as possible...
...adult-education classes were started...
...A different problem is posed by the unseen nuclear submarines which plague the Irish coast—one-eighth of the American strategic nuclear arsenal is in the Irish Sea—and the nuclear-armed aircraft that fly high above Irish heads...
...Like the process of democracy, he says, organizing requires constant attention...
...As in New Zealand, the Irish government will clearly come under intense pressure to block such legislation...
...Inviting himself in for a cup of coffee, he would stay just long enough to introduce himself and have a short chat...
...A woman can thus bear a child of the sex of her choice by being artificially inseminated with a batch of sperm bearing the sex chromosome of choice...
...The cruise missiles delivered to Greenham Common, England, were in all probability flown through Irish airspace and will, after the INF treaty, return via the same route...
...A three-member committee, chaired by the health secretary of Maharashtra, has drafted similar national legislation for parliamentary consideration...
...The Conyngham's crew had its rest-and-recreation weekend in Cork, which revived revived a controversy surrounding Ireland's antinuclear stance...
...Canada, Japan, and Australia joined the United States in massing forty-five ships, seven submarines, 155 aircraft, and 50,000 troops in Hawaii...
...Joan Conrow (Joan Conrow is a free-lance writer in Hanalei, Hawaii...
...Preventing Women from Being Born BOMBAY, INDIA Amniocentesis and other tests for genetic defects in fetuses are the basis of a big new business in the developing world: predicting the sex of unborn children...
...And, most important, the town knew how to handle its problems...
...India already has one of the lowest female-to-male ratios in the world-933-to-1,000-and is one of only five countries where the male life expectancy exceeds the female...
...In ancient times, its huge quarry provided material for weapons and tools, and its highest peak, Moa Ula, served as a center for training in navigation and astronomy...
...Ninety-nine per cent of people who are coming here for sex-selection have two daughters, three daughters, even four or five daughters already...
...Ross soon realized his sympathies lay with the workers, not with the powerful growers...
...The court also ordered the Navy to curtail massive erosion on the island and protect the shrines and sites that offer, according to the Navy's own archaeologist, one of only two remaining opportunities to study ancient Hawaiian ways of life...
...He recalls that, soon after Chavez agreed to work with him, the young man asked how long the organizing would last...
...Arthur R. Kroeber (Arthur R. Kroeber is a freelance writer based in New Delhi...
...But as for sex selection, she says, "I think it's a legitimate choice...
...I had to educate people on the spot about what power could do and how to get it...
...Margaret Mead wrote of Ross's "remarkable ability to help people help themselves...
...The smallest of Hawaii's eight major islands, Kaho'olawe holds special significance...
...But the Ohana's goals are often stymied by the Navy...
...The Ohana has had some success in limiting the military's stranglehold on the island...
...Amniocentesis was first performed in India in 1975, and it soon became clear that Indian parents were far less interested in the possible genetic abnormalities of their children than in their sex...
...And Carey McWilliams once referred to his "exasperating modesty," noting that he is "the kind who never steps forward to claim his fair share of credit for any enterprise in which he is involved...
...The modern Indian urban middle classes, however, inhabit cramped apartments and are trying to improve their standard of living, and families of more than three children are impractical...
...Banning sex-selection will be much harder than stopping amniocentesis: It arouses less hostility than does selective abortion, and many gynecologists who were queasy about amniocentesis find nothing morally questionable about sperm separation...
...Under pressure from them the state of Maharashtra (whose capital is Bombay) passed a law in April banning prenatal sex tests...
...So he moved on...
...He's completing a book of organizing axioms...
...After graduation and a short stint as a social worker, he hired on with the Farm Security Administration and was shortly put in charge of the FSA's camp for migrant workers at Arvin—home to the Joad family of The Grapes of Wrath...
...And, despite widespread public and political opposition, Canada and the United States continued a long-standing tradition of bombing Kaho'olawe...
...The Navy is constantly trying to discredit us," says Atwood "Maka" Makanani, an Ohana founder...
...We are perceived as a terrorist organization, because that's a scenario they can deal with...
...This is the spread of the "nuclear allergy" that the nuclear powers fear...
...Saul Al-insky sought him out, asking him to go to Montana to work with miners who were taking on the copper lords...
...Official government figures reveal that 12,000 foreign military aircraft are granted permission to overfly Ireland each year and that 80 per cent of them are American...
...Chavez is the most famous of those he helped, but there are many others...
...The Ohana (which means "family" in Hawaiian) was founded in 1976 by native Hawaiian activists, and it has been trying ever since to end all military use of the island...
...We have a tremendous sense of responsibility to ourselves and our children," Makanani says...
...Even that distinction rarely earns it much attention...
...In succeeding years, however, hundreds of private practitioners in Bombay, Delhi, and elsewhere started otTering the test, at a cost of anywhere from $5 to $80...
...The nuclear powers have a policy of "neither confirming nor denying" the presence of nuclear weapons on board their aircraft and ships...
...citizenship...
...He spent two years at Arvin running the camp democratically...
...Five major airways directly connecting North America with Europe pass over Ireland...
...Ross stayed on with Alinsky, organizing barrios...
...Still, the Ohana will not even consider giving up the fight...
...And, also, just as we have been encouraged by New Zealand, we would hope that an Irish NFZ would encourage other such zones in other countries...
...In new communities, he would start off by simply "hanging around" and talking with anyone he could find, sometimes going door to door...
...Nuclear-free-zone legislation is not viewed merely as a safety measure for Ireland, says Irish CND chairwoman Deirdre Cantwell: "Eighty-four per cent of the Irish people support a policy of neutrality for this country...
...Its 544 archaeological sites have earned it a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, but they are rarely the focus of academic study...
...The man riding the horse is Ronald Ericsson, an American reproductive biologist who has patented a technique for separating a man's sperm into batches containing male or female chromosomes...
...The small windswept island is clearly visible from the resorts of Maui, but it's not even listed on tourist maps...
...But in July, when the United States held its eleventh Rim of the Pacific exercises (RIMPAC), Kaho'olawe figured prominently in the local news...
...And Maui Mayor Hannibal Tavares claims that, since he visited the island in late June, ending the bombing has become an "obsession" with him...
...In fact, the only other people who aren't ignoring Kaho'olawe are those who value its strategic importance as a bombing target...
...Ancient Hawaiian concepts—hooponopono and aloha—are used to resolve differences and inspire cooperation...
...Senator Daniel Inouye has promised to hold hearings into the military's need for Kaho'o-lawe...
...He headed for Cleveland, where he concentrated on finding jobs and housing for Japanese-Americans, some of whom were allowed to leave the camps if they moved east and had jobs and housing guaranteed...
...Meh-ta's contention is supported by testimony from gynecologists who performed amniocenteses and by a survey of fifty Bombay gynecologists in 1986...
...Huge craters pockmark the red soil...
...Recently, however, Kaho'olawe has come to symbolize more than just a link to the past...
...a doctor was hired for a local medical clinic...
...Nonetheless, Fred Ross recently sat down for a talk about his life as an organizer...
...We're against both," says Vibhuti Patel, whose Women's Center in Bombay led the fight to ban prenatal sex tests...
...After more than forty years on the road, living out of his car, sleeping in barren motel rooms or on cots in other people's houses, Ross has finally settled down in Corte Madera...
...In 1952, Chavez was a part-time lumber handler who lived with his wife and small children in the San Jose barrio known to its residents as Sal Si Puedes— meaning "get out if you can...
...We simply don't understand why they are still allowing foreign countries to bomb Kaho'olawe," says Noa Em-mett Aluli, spokesman for Protect Kaho'olawe Ohana...
...He can't remember the exact words used by his employer, he says, but "I do know they used everything but 'organize.' That was considered radical at the time...
...Brought in to replace a camp director known for ruling with his fists, Ross wanted residents to know he was different...
...forces have been shelling Kaho'olawe since World War II, and President Dwight Eisenhower gave the Navy sole jurisdiction over it in 1953...
...Ross was itching to take his skills to Los Angeles...
...Of particular note was Lae O Kealaikahiki—launching point for voyages by Hawaiians to their ancestral home in Tahiti...
...Female children are discriminated against by their parents in nutrition and health care, and feminists say the only way to reverse these patterns is to fight any practice that strengthens preferences for male children and, in effect, denies women the right to be born...
...local streets were paved...
...Working for the Chicago-based American Council on Race Relations, he returned to southern California, then the scene of much anti-Hispanic racial unrest...
...The Conyng-harris welcoming party consisted of environmental and peace groups protesting the violation of neutral Ireland's antinuclear policy...
...The war games were the largest maritime exercises undertaken in the region since 1971...
...A number of other organizations, politicians, and personalities (including the Irish rock group U2) have also joined in...
...By the time the elder Ross met Chavez in 1952, he had years of community organizing behind him...
...The cost is about $500, well above the p^r-capita national income of $270...
...Since the early 1980s, Ericsson's firm Gametrics, Ltd., has set up about fifty sex-selection clinics worldwide...
...But settling down doesn't mean retirement for this seventy-seven-year-old—only semiretirement...
...Small gardens are coaxed from the dry, eroded soil, and additional food is gathered from the sea...
...A stone hula platform and meeting house has been laboriously constructed by hand...
...He may just get around to finishing the autobiography he started in the 1950s...
...So says Cesar Chavez...
...For us it's the survival of women that's at stake...
...He spent four months in community services at an internment camp for Japanese-Americans before quitting...
...All the couples wanted male children...
...We can't part with the land...
...Ross's father was a newspaperman and both parents were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans...
...So anything that can increase the chance that one of those two or three children is a boy finds ready acceptance...
...The son of migrant farm workers and a former migrant worker himself, he wanted desperately to change the conditions under which they and thousands of others worked and lived...
...In India, the business is so big it's on its way to being outlawed, because sex-determination tests are often followed by selective abortion of female fetuses...
...It's a further degradation of the status of women...
...But for the next nine years, working out of their cars, the two men traveled the valleys of California organizing some twenty community-service organizations...
...Particularly now with the ban on amniocentesis, the demand is bound to go up," he says...
...It would ban the manufacture, deployment, and transportation of any nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons in Ireland, its airspace, and its territorial waters...
...nuclear weapons based in Europe are periodically brought back to Rocky Flats in Colorado for servicing...
...A 1981 consent decree gave the Ohana one victory: access to part of Kaho'olawe ten weekends each year...
...The leading government hospital and research center, the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, stopped doing amniocentesis in 1979 after discovering that parents sought it almost exclusively for sex determination...
...He changed my life...
...Creation legends speak of it as the island of death, a place kapu, or forbidden, to everyone since the days when the Earth Mother gave birth to all the other islands...
...Ross helped them start a community association including both groups in April 1964, and he stayed five months...
...Says Fred Ross with a chuckle, "I had to tell him...
...playgrounds were built...
...No wonder...
...But even if such a law is passed, "birth discrimination" against females is likely to continue in India, in part because of an enterprising American reproductive biologist who is marketing a technique that allows parents to choose the sex of their next child before conception...
...But the policy has hardly been vigorously enforced...
...It was 1946 and Ross, by now married and a father, located his young family in Long Beach...
...At Arvin he got his first taste of community organizing...
...Kaho'olawe may be, in the words of one military official, "a paradise for the Navy, a small-scale realistic war territory just a short hop from Pearl Harbor," but many other people see it differently...
...In short, the Ohana's Hakioawa is an authentic oasis in a state where Hawaiian culture has been adulterated and commercialized for tourist consumption...
...Carol Fox (Carol Fox, an American who has lived in Dublin since 1974, is active in the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament...
...Air Force Star-lifter and Galaxy cargo planes, types likely to be carrying nuclear weapons between the United States and Europe...
...Bombay's City Clinic was until recently the Gametrics franchise in India...
...The Ohana has built a small settlement at Hakioawa on its allotted portion of land...
...Because of advances in medical technology, however, such legislation may amount to closing the barn door after the horse has bolted...
...Two major heiau (pre-Christian places of worship) have been restored and are again being used in religious ceremonies...
...Where he found isolated individuals who had nothing—least of all, hope—he left behind organized groups whose members had gained not only hope but also the ability to turn hope into reality...
...Fred Ross showed him how...
...It is the only large, undeveloped, uninhabited, publicly owned piece of land in Hawaii—a place where they can relearn and then teach their children the traditions and practices of an ancient culture that emphasizes a spiritual, life-sustaining relationship with the land, or aina...
...Since then, thousands of tons of ordnance have rained down on the island from sky and sea...
...By early winter, Guadalupe had its first police officer, its first door-to-door mail delivery, a new municipal water system, and a new clinic for babies...
...It amounted to female infanticide and nothing else...
...U.S...
...For the past twenty years, it has been Irish government policy to deny access to Irish territory or airspace to any craft that is nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed, or engaged in a military exercise...
...When he left, the local highway was being policed for the first time and was no longer a speedway deathtrap...
...A group like the Protect Kaho'olawe Ohana, which rejects mainstream Western values, doesn't hold much faith in Government promises and proceedings...
...He grew up in Los Angeles, but all he knew about Hispanics was that they stayed on one side of the local swimming hole and he and his friends stayed on the other...
...At the University of Southern California, though, he encountered an economics professor whose own socialism 'I had to educate people on the spot,' says Fred Ross, 'about what power could do and how to get it.' showed Ross there are other ways of viewing the world...
...I was never interested in becoming a leader myself," Ross says...
...Daughters, by contrast, are expensive: A young woman's wedding, including dowry, can cost her father five years' salary...
...But its members do remain convinced that, because the goals of the Ohana are right and just, they will one day be realized...
...So the question of discrimination doesn't arise," he says...
...The Irish government asks no questions and expects no answers...
...The Irish government's vigilance in enforcing its ban is indicated by the fact that it says it has refused entry or crossover only twelve times in the past ten years—twelve refusals out of almost 120,000 military overflights and hundreds of warship visits...
...Ross's name is not a household word, though, and that speaks volumes about his success as a community organizer...
...America's other Pacific allies agreed years ago to stop shelling Kaho'olawe...
...position: "Without the type of realistic training that can be obtained on Kaho'olawe, the readiness of our forces in the mid-Pacific cannot be maintained...
...Several years later, he was off to work with the Yaqui Indian population of Guadalupe, Arizona...
...But the next job had a sour taste of its own...
...Its executive director is Fred G. Ross, his forty-year-old son...
...Live shells, duds, and military trash litter the terrain...
...Nurgesh Motashaw, a leading Bombay gynecologist...
...An NFZ— with its refusal to facilitate the nuclear-war preparations of either NATO or the Warsaw Pact—would reaffirm our neutrality...
...Nuclear Allergy' Spreads DUBLIN, IRELAND Last July, the U.S.S...
...A Paradise for the Navy' KAHO'OLAWE, HAWAII Mention Kaho'olawe, and most Americans draw a blank...
...He admits to a "sheltered youth...
...Cesar Chavez, in Sal Si Puedes, was at first suspicious of this "gringo" who was looking for him...
...And its cultural importance to native Hawaiians is usually ignored...
...That goes beyond being insensitive to being an insult to our heritage...
...And he's training community organizers for Neighbor to Neighbor, a group that combines grass-roots techniques and mass media to mobilize opposition to aid for the Nicaraguan contras...
...Gallons of coffee later, Ross had established himself as an ally...
...Irish CND has been joined by Greenpeace and an Irish environmental group called Earthwatch in campaigning for this legislation...
...After the Arizona project, he hooked up again with Cesar Chavez—and spent fifteen years training organizers for the United Farm Workers...
...Then, in the early 1980s, Ross turned his attention to the peace movement, where it has been ever since...
...Mehta, however, dismisses such arguments...
...The desire for male children here is still strong, in part because males continue the family line, but more importantly because sons are expected to support their aged parents...
...I was interested in working with people to help them develop as leaders...
...The main disarmament group in Ireland, the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, has drafted a bill to declare the country a nuclear-free zone, a bill based on similar legislation passed in New Zealand...
...By the late 1950s, Chavez left to get back to his original aim—organizing farmworkers...
...Ross has taken his talent, energy, and extraordinary commitment into Mexican-American communities and agricultural fields, Indian villages and low-income housing projects, all across the country...
...Some gynecologists offered follow-up abortions for as little as $5...
...Only Canada has steadfastly resisted the intense lobbying, including formal and personal requests from Hawaiian politicians, that influenced other nations to shun that part of the RIMPAC exercise...
...After the war, Ross took his first step down the path that led him to San Jose and his meeting with Chavez...
...were equally needy, and Alinsky hired him and let him stay put...
...Errant ammunition mines the bays and coves...
...Recently, the group has found some support in political circles...
...But some feminist groups reject the argument that a woman's right to control her pregnancy extends that far...
...Native Hawaiians see it also as their future, a last hope for preserving a beleaguered culture...
...These violations are at least visible...
...Although sex-selection doesn't raise the moral issue involved in selective abortion, feminists don't see much difference between the two...
...I said, 'It's going to last forever.' " —Joy Ann Zimmerman (Joy Ann Zimmerman is a staff reporter for the Pacific Sun in San Francisco...
...The clinics are especially popular in the developing world-Taiwan, Thailand, India, Pakistan, and Jordan all have Ericsson clinics...
...This impoverished village, which included Mexican-Americans as well as Indians, lacked all the basic necessities and, to make matters worse, the two groups of residents didn't get along...
Vol. 52 • December 1988 • No. 12
