What good is research and development if no one is listening?

David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer

Government officials gathered in Baton Rouge a year ago to deal with a powerful hurricane bearing down on New Orleans.

They faced a nightmare scenario. A flooded city, 1 million evacuees, 60,000 dead -- all the work of Hurricane Pam.

The storm was not real. Staged with the help of a San Francisco company, Pam was a simulation designed to force government agencies to examine -- and possibly rethink -- their disaster plans.

The exercise, conducted with the help of URS Corp., projected storm water surging over levees and pouring into New Orleans, forming a contaminated pool 10 to 20 feet deep. More than 500,000 buildings were destroyed in the scenario, coastal gasoline refineries were shut, and boats and helicopters were needed to rescue thousands of stranded citizens.

In short, Pam looked a lot like Hurricane Katrina.

"It's eerie how close it is," said Madhu Beriwal, founder and president of Innovative Emergency Management Inc., based in Baton Rouge. The company led a team of three firms, including URS, that created the simulation, working under contract for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA has come under blistering criticism for its slow response to Katrina. Beriwal said she isn't sure whether Pam shaped the way FEMA and state and local agencies responded to the real-life catastrophe. Those who participated in last year's exercise have copies of the recommendations it produced.

"So people are looking at it," she said. "I don't know how much of it was used."

FEMA representatives did not return phone calls for this story. In a press release last year, however, an agency official said the exercise helped refine hurricane planning in the New Orleans area.

Working with federal and state officials, Beriwal's firm and its two partners devised a scenario that pictured a hurricane hitting land west of New Orleans, with winds of 120 miles per hour. The National Hurricane Center provided storm surge projections that the companies used to estimate the likely destruction.

Those estimates were given to the more than 270 people who participated in the Hurricane Pam exercise, held in July 2004. The participants represented city, state and federal government agencies, as well as volunteer organizations.

Pam's mock damage, spread over 13 Louisiana parishes, was extensive. Phone and sewer services were knocked out, chemical plants flooded. About 200 miles of road lay under at least 10 feet of water. About 175,000 people were injured, 200,000 became sick, and more than 60,000 were killed.

Part of Pam's impact derived from the path its creators chose. Having the hurricane's eye pass west of New Orleans meant the city would face the full brunt of the storm's force, since hurricane winds and precipitation during landfall are strongest in their northeast quadrant.

"We wanted to create catastrophic conditions that would force people to think outside the box and think how they'd respond to it," Beriwal said.

Katrina, in contrast, landed east of the city.

Working in teams, participants in the weeklong exercise came up with recommendations. About 1,000 shelters would be needed for evacuees. The shelters would need to stay open 100 days, but state resources could only keep them stocked for five days at most.

With many residents stranded by floodwaters, boats would be needed for about 20,000 rescues. Helicopters would be needed for 1,000 more rescues.

A team focusing on health problems discussed how to rapidly immunize residents against tetanus, influenza and other diseases that could break out in the hurricane's aftermath. Team members identified locations where the sick or wounded could receive emergency treatment.

Beriwal declined to provide a copy of the written recommendations, saying that under her company's contract, the document could only be released by FEMA.

In a press release at the end of the exercise, a FEMA official said participants had learned much from Hurricane Pam.

"We made great progress this week in our preparedness," said Ron Castleman, who was FEMA's regional director at the time. He left the agency late last year.

"Disaster response teams developed action plans in critical areas such as search and rescue, medical care, sheltering, temporary housing, school restoration and debris management," Castleman said in the release. "These plans are essential for quick response to a hurricane but will also help in other emergencies."

San Francisco's URS Corp. declined to comment other than to acknowledge its work on the contract with Beriwal's firm. About 1,100 URS employees and contractors are now in the states hit by Katrina, helping with disaster-relief efforts.

Although much of the Hurricane Pam exercise foreshadowed Katrina, Beriwal hopes that the real storm's casualty figure proves to be far lower than Pam's. Considering the devastation Katrina wrought, the simulation's accuracy gives her no comfort.

"I can not be pleased with it," she said. "This is our state. ... This is appalling."

E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.

A note from a high school acquaintance to a friend of his.

hi jerry, i hope all is well. dan (my stepson) called about two hours ago. he is leaving for iraq tonight. his mother talked to him for about half an hour, started crying and went into the bedroom. i took the phone and we talked and said our good byes. he is up beat. his sister called and is crying so hard she can not talk. i brought my mother dinner and she ask me about dan. my mother is 90 years old. i told her i just got the call. she started crying and ask me why we are in iraq? i could not answer her. dan has been her steady grandchild. he would go over four or five times a week and just talk. my kids go over once every two months. yes i know, it is the noble cause. jerry, what is the noble cause? i have ask you before but i don't know what your answer is. you are a good person and i like you, yet, you tell me if you were a young man you would go to iraq for the noble cause. what is the noble cause? dan served for three years and has been in the "in active reserve for six years". they called him back. the noble cause. jerry, what is the noble cause? is the cause noble enough for the bush girls to go over to iraq? if not, why? is it ok for other peoples kids to died in iraq for the "noble cause" but not the bush kids? my mother told me she heard about the first world war from her mother and the relatives that died. noble cause? i think so. my mother told me about the cousins that were killed in the second world war. noble cause, i think so. my mother told me about the korean war. noble cause? nothing changed. thousands of our people died. my mother told me about the vietnam war. a noble cause ? nothing changed. thousands of our young men died. you and i knew many of them. iraq? a noble cause? no wmd. all lies. will you tell my wife and my mother what the noble cause is? i can't.
pat

"My first Critical Mass was really an eye opener," Leah Shahum told me. "I had never thought of bicycling as a political thing, as a part of a social movement. Riding with a thousand people just felt so empowering. It felt different: I felt safer, I felt more confident. These were good feelings."

That was 1996, shortly after Shahum had moved to San Francisco a few years out of college. It was the period when Critical Mass established San Francisco as the epicenter of militant bicycling culture, as thousands of bikers swarmed in a usually joyous and always chaotic monthly leaderless parade. A decade later, Shahum is executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and the public face of a new kind of grown-up bicycle activism.

Over the past decade, bicyclists have transitioned from traffic-snarling outsiders to pillars of civic life. They have merged smoothly with the mainstream and, with the imminent passage of the City's new Bicycle Plan Update (also called the Bike Plan Update), the movement is graduating to a new phase.

Last Monday, I rode with Shahum down freshly striped bike lanes on Market Street. She rides a green Trek hybrid that's clearly seen a lot of urban biking but also a lot of love. We were on our way to City Hall, where Shahum was due to address San Francisco's City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee about planned changes to Potrero Avenue -- changes that will include the addition of bike lanes.

It was the start of a hectic week for Shahum -- two days later, the watershed Bike Plan Update was to go before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors' Land Use Committee, its final stop on a long meander toward the full board. The day after that was Bike to Work Day, the most visible officially sanctioned bike event each year.

Shahum was in fine form, giddily energetic and talking a mile a minute as she rode with fluid ease. "These lanes went in this week," she explained. "I'm really excited. Check out the double line: You don't see that anywhere else in the City!" She's a transportation geek ("Look!" she exclaimed as we passed the library, "they're putting in the new bike parking!") with an intuitive grasp for grassroots coalition building that epitomizes the strengths of the bicycling movement in San Francisco.

Shahum is equally at home poring over dull traffic studies -- the Bicycle Coalition's office seems to have these lying on every available surface -- or networking and rallying the faithful. In her nearly seven years with the organization (the last two and a half as director), Shahum has built an easy rapport with the City's bikers. (The organization was founded in the 1970s but was moribund for a decade until 1991, when it was revived by the Critical Mass generation of activists.)

When we got to the meeting room in City Hall, which was filled past capacity on a Monday afternoon, Shahum went into networking mode, moving from person to person like a born politician. Now she's having a quick word with a City staffer; now she's thanking a supporter for coming; now she's checking in with a volunteer's preteen daughter: "You have a great dad! But you knew that."

"Our constituency is mainstream," she told me later. "We had people at that meeting who were parents -- one mother was there with a newborn baby. We have older people, homeowners, car drivers. People in business suits come out and advocate for bike lanes and safer streets."

As the bike movement becomes a part of the civic landscape, Shahum says, old stereotypes no longer apply. "The image of the renegade bicyclist with blue hair is not helpful," she told me. "Not that there's anything wrong with blue hair, of course, but the Bicycle Coalition couldn't be more wholesome." Shahum herself was smartly turned out that day in a lime-green buttoned shirt and a neat, businesslike haircut with nary a strand of blue in it.

It is a measure of just how far the movement has come that, at the committee meeting, the supervisors and city planners were falling all over each other to reassert the importance of biking in the City's transportation picture, and to praise the Bicycle Coalition.

"It was a great meeting," Supervisor Tom Ammiano, who sponsored the changes, told me later. (The stretch of Potrero Avenue in question -- from 17th Street to 25th street, in front of San Francisco General Hospital, is in his district.) "They've been very persistent and very present at City Hall. Having more bikes on the road address a lot of important urban issues: the environment, traffic congestion, parking, recreation, health. It's not rocket science, but the Bicycle Coalition points it out; they connect the dots for people." The committee moved unanimously to send the plan before the full board; work could start as early as June.

The Bicycle Coalition estimates that up to 40,000 people regularly commute by bicycle in San Francisco. Their membership of 4,500 is just a fraction of this number, showing how broad the appeal of biking is in a city where half the residents own bikes. Indeed, 2000 Census figures show that from 1990 to 2000, when biking's share of commutes doubled, San Francisco was the only county in California in which that figure increased.

Peter Tannen, the bicycle program manager at San Francisco's Department of Parking and Traffic, presided over this increase. When he was hired in 1992, he was the City's first and only internal bicycle advocate. "A lot of the increase has to do with bicyclists getting more active," he told me. "It helped me to get funds to stripe the lanes, which in turn attracted more riders. It's about safety and access."

The Bicycle Coalition's Shahum agrees. "Fear on the road is the No. 1 reason people don't ride," she says, "but bike lanes make things much safer." From 1998 to 2002, while bike ridership was increasing dramatically, collisions with cars decreased by about 30 percent, thanks in part to more bike lanes. That's why the completion of a citywide network of bike lanes is the Bicycle Coalition's highest priority.

Tom Ammiano adds that the attitudes of drivers have also changed. "People really care if a biker is hit or killed in San Francisco," he says. Ammiano has seen the changes firsthand: The Valencia Street bike lanes, striped in his district in 1999, were a watershed victory for the Bicycle Coalition and are the example by which every other project since then has been measured. "The Valencia lanes were the big turning point," he says. "There was a lot of protest from the neighborhood, and things didn't work out right away." But since then, Valencia has become safer and more enjoyable for bikers, drivers, and pedestrians -- the bike lanes have contributed to the renaissance of this people-scaled urban corridor.

But Shahum says the Bicycle Coalition isn't resting on its laurels. "We're much less outsiders than we were five or seven years ago," she says. "Bicycle transportation is becoming more mainstream, but I wouldn't say that we are truly insiders. If we were, then we wouldn't need to be out there actively campaigning to make sure the City plans for biking."

Still, bicyclists have clearly arrived on the political scene. Until 2000, the Bicycle Coalition was a nonprofit, barred from campaigning for candidates for public office. Spurred by the mayoral election that year, in which Tom Ammiano forced a surprise runoff against Mayor Willie Brown, the coalition reorganized itself. "They were smart to create a political action committee," says Ammiano, who received the bikers' support, "because most people want their endorsement. They are very smart people."

Indeed, since the 2000 election, the Board of Supervisors has been strongly pro-bike. Bike to Work Day is now an institution -- last week's was the 11th. And, in spite of the drizzle that day, Mayor Gavin Newsom and four supervisors turned out to ride up Market Street at 7 am. "I was impressed that the mayor rode in the rain," Shahum says. "He really knew how to handle the slick tracks." It's a far cry -- for both the City government and the bicycling movement -- from the days when then-Mayor Willie Brown locked horns with Critical Mass.

But things are about to get even more interesting. The stage is set for San Francisco to become a clear nationwide leader in integrating the bicycle into city planning. The Bike Plan Update establishes a stunning goal for the City: By 2010, 10 percent of all trips around the City will be by bike, on a network that will include at least 20 major changes to city streets. Oliver Gajda, the City's assistant bicycle program manager (one of half a dozen people, all of whom bike to their job, who work in Peter Tannen's office), spearheaded the effort to assemble this massive document. "The mission is to make bicycling an integral part of daily life in San Francisco," he says. The City already has the highest ridership for U.S. cities of its size, but the 10 percent goal is a quintupling of the use of bikes. "It's going to take a lot of different players to reach the goal," says Gajda, who adds that the plan calls for a combination of new traffic engineering, including bike lanes, plus biker education and better enforcement of traffic regulations for both bikers and drivers.

The Land Use Committee's unanimous approval of the Bike Plan Update sets the stage for the full Board of Supervisors to consider incorporating the update into the City's General Plan later this month. If that happens, bikes will be a permanent part of San Francisco's every-five-year planning cycle, and biking in the City will have taken its biggest step yet. "The Bike Plan is very important," explains Ammiano. "Even without the Bicycle Coalition or a sympathetic board and mayor, once it is codified, it will stay around as official policy."

With the plan in place, cyclists will be that much closer to bringing the empowerment they first felt in Critical Mass onto the streets of San Francisco permanently.

But Ammiano cautions that we still have a long way to go with what he calls "America's love affair with the car."

Shahum concurs, and adds that the prior two generations of city planners were so enamoured of cars that they redesigned the City with only motorists in mind. "San Francisco used to be all sidewalk," she says. "Now, it's all parking."

But how far can this activism go? "You can wear out your welcome," warns Ammiano. "I've been around a long time, so I've seen things in cycles. Currently, bicyclists do have a lot of muscle. But, again, everything changes. You don't want to be too successful -- whatever that means."

But Shahum says that's just the problem -- cars have been too successful, and it's time for a correction. "We can't talk about balance until we've swung back toward solving some of the problems that have been caused over the past 50 years by giving this City over to cars," she says adamantly. "Projects like Potrero are important for bike safety and pedestrian safety, but they're also really important symbolically because we're taking back car space for other users. When those things are happening on their own, we won't need a Bicycle Coalition any more. We'd love to work ourselves out of business."

Critical Mass still takes place on the last Friday of each month, which happens to be this week, starting at Justin Herman Plaza, across the Embarcadero from the Ferry Building, at 5:30 p.m.

Gregory Dicum, author of Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air, writes about the natural world from San Francisco. A forester by training, Gregory has worked at the front lines of some of the world's most urgent environmental crises. For more of his work, see http://www.dicum.com/list.

Support your local (subversive!) librarians!

Dear Colleague:

We need your help and just a small amount of your time.

There is an initiative spearheaded by a group of alternative papers, which is planning an investigative report this summer to appear in as many as 150 papers nationwide. This report will examine the controversy surrounding government attempts to spy on citizens in libraries using provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, as well as other means.

Specifically, the story will focus on what extent the government is using library, bookseller, ISP, medical, banking and other records to spy on its own citizens since September 11th. Additionally, this investigation will look at the extent to which the government has done so in the past, pre-9/11.

To help in this investigation, the alternative press is seeking librarians who have had experience in the recent or distant past in which they have been contacted by government entities, formally or otherwise, for the purpose of attaining information on library users. These could be:

• Contacts from the police, FBI, INS, the Justice Department, or other government representatives;
• Informal requests to report suspicious people, provide patron records, provide records of people checking out certain books or report patrons showing interest in certain subjects; or
• Court-ordered requests or just pressure or intimidation by government representatives.

This project is very important to ALA. The story addresses a subject close to librarians' hearts-the privacy rights of our patrons. Please give us 10 minutes of your time and complete a survey being conducted by the Library Research Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which will ask, for example, whether you personally have been asked by a law enforcement agent for information about a user; if so, whether the officer was a federal, state, or local agent, and what type of information was requested. The survey is found at http://lrcsurvey.lis.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/qwebcorporate.cgi?idx=JCV473. The deadline for completing the survey is July 22, 2004.

The gag order associated with the PATRIOT Act only applies to librarians who have actually been served with a court order issued under Section 215 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or a National Security Letter, Section 505. Librarians who are or have been contacted by law enforcement and other government entities in other circumstances are free to speak about those experiences, unless the court order specifically has a gag order attached.

I assure you that your answers will be collected on a secure server and deleted from both the server and its archives once analyzed. Responses will be analyzed only in the aggregate.

Our deepest thanks in advance for your assistance in helping us understand this increasingly complex issue. We intend to publicize the findings widely!

This survey should not be confused with the more extensive and precise ALA survey which will take place in the Fall.

Sincerely,

Judith F. Krug

Director

Office for Intellectual Freedom

Dear Colleagues:

As you likely know, a Tent City was erected last weekend on the Block D land. This initiative was taken by a group of homeless people and local activists organized as the Kingston Coalition Against Poverty. The purpose is to build public awareness of the need for an increase in welfare rates, shelter allowances, and affordable housing in Kingston.

People staying in the Tent City have limited resources, and are therefore making a call to those of us who are in solidarity with their goals and more fortunately situated. I hope that you will consider doing what you can to help make sure the Tent City remains a safe and comfortable environment. Included below is a list of things that are needed.

Thank you,
Richard Day

• flashlights
• mosquito coils (to make community meetings more bearable)
• more tents
• basins and/or buckets (for washing dishes and hands)
• First Aid stuff (a full kit would be best, but every little bit helps and there is a nurse that is coming around occasionally to check on people)
• dish soap and hand soap
• citronella kerosene (for those tiki torch/garden torch things)
• big nails
• blankets/old carpets or rugs/folding chairs/stools or other things to sit on under the community tent for meetings
• some more pots for cooking
• some utensils (spatulas, serving spoons, etc.)
• Coleman fuel
• COOLERS AND ICE PACKS (to keep food donations from rotting in the hot sun) -- this is essential!
• large water jug
• marine plug adapter and extension cords (because the site is by the water, the only source of electricity comes through marine plugs. An adapter would allow us to use the donated projector for some movie nights!)

• canned soups
• canned beans
• bags of pasta
• cooking oil
• salt
• coffee
• water
• fresh fruits and veggies (which really enjoy being stored in a cooler...)
• other perishables (dairy, eggs, meat)

COOK MEALS - although there are stoves, there is nowhere to store fresh fruits and veggies or perishables like meat, dairy, and eggs. if you'd like to give Tent City a real treat, a meal with those yummies in it would be much appreciated!

set-up - come by and ask if you can help set up a tarp, tent, or otherwise make yourself useful

for those out-of-towners, we are currently making arrangements for financial donations. email robyn@riseup.net for info on how to donate.

SUPPORT TENT CITY! RAISE THE RATES AND BUILD HOUSING NOW!

Come one come all to a 'stop Starbucks' INFORMATION PICKET on the corner of Wellington and Princess St.

Bring your kids, musical instruments, face paints, costumes, balloons, banners, pots and pans etc. This is an event for the whole family to say 'NO to STARBUCKS' and 'YES to LOCAL BUSINESS'!! We need the whole community to support locally owned and operated businesses and to stop multinational corporations from entering into Kingston's downtown core. This is a peaceful demonstration and information session about why Kingston should not support major multinational corporations taking over the downtown core, Starbucks in particular. There will be lots of information flyers to hand out to passers by so bring your friends! If you don't want to hand out flyers you can play music or sing songs or stand there in support of an anti-corporate Kingston.

To join Kingston's Stop Starbucks campaign please email stopstarbucks@hotmail.com .

I am pleased and honoured to be here tonight to introduce Errol Morris’s Academy-Award winning documentary film, The Fog of War. I want to thank Cinema Kingston and those who support it, for providing the opportunity to view it. It is an important document, both as achievement in cinema, and psychology (as character study), its technical handling of images, its power of interpretation, and—connected--as a prism through which to view important developments in the twentieth century through one man’s eyes. The film helps us to understand why we are where we are, and even who we are.

I have some identification with Robert S. McNamara: Like him, I was born in San Francisco. Like him, I attended the University of California at Berkeley. Finally, my second car was a 1957 Ford Fairlane. I got that car a year after McNamara became president of Ford Motor Company, and I loved that car—neither knowing nor caring who McNamara was—more than any other possession during my teenage years. In the next decade, of course, as the Vietnam War escalated, everyone would come to know the name Robert McNamara. Many of us who opposed the war added expletives when we mentioned it.

Toward the end of his memoir, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995), McNamara writes two profoundly telling paragraphs—telling in the tension, if not contradiction, between them:

In sum, we should strive to create a world in which relations among nations would be based on the rule of law, a world in which national security would be supported by a system of collective security. The conflict prevention, conflict resolution, and peacekeeping functions necessary to accomplish these objectives would be performed by multilateral institutions, a reorganized and strengthened United Nations, together with new and expanded regional organizations….”

and

We must learn from Vietnam how to manage limited wars effectively. A major cause of the debacle there lay in our failure to establish an organization of top civilian and military officials capable of discerning the task. Over and over again…we failed to address fundamental issues; our failure to identify them was not recognized; and deep-seated disagreements among the president’s advisers about how to proceed were neither surfaced nor resolved.

McNamara is the Military-Industrial Complex incarnate. He is what President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech-writer Emmett John Hughes warned us against in Ike’s famous Farewell Address, and what the critical sociologist C. Wright Mills dissected five years earlier in his book. Defining American hubris is to recognize the potent amalgam—that sense of mission, moral duty, technological know-how, and the confidence that come what may we shall see the job through (Mark Twain called it “the calm confidence of a Christian holding four aces”)—which makes the Republic an entity in the world, but not of it. Here, in a benign reading, you will see, how altruism from a self-anointed occupant of the moral high ground prevented critical thought, self-criticism, and ways in which lessons drawn from past history that suggested not to do things were ignored in favour of dubious action after dubious action.

McNamara never learned. His book, In Retrospect reveals a quintessential, but lamentably American inability to admit error. For all his ability to be critical, and he can be critical, the undertaking in Vietnam remains sacrosanct. Novelist Graham Greene caught this problematic attitude well in his cautionary tale of early American activity in Vietnam, prior to the epochal battle of Dienbienphu, The Quiet American. Journalist Neil Sheehan developed a similar take, albeit from a different angle, in his brilliant biography of John Paul Vann, an American soldier-policymaker whose career covered most of the active U.S. years. Like McNamara, Vann never admitted mistake. Sheehan’s book, A Bright and Shining Lie, should be read alongside Greene’s volume, especially after viewing The Fog of War.

Hence there is a great deal of tension in the film, as McNamara speaks to the camera, the urgency of his explanations for actions taken by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations becomes the compelling force of the film. McNamara is clearly aware of the skepticism that will greet his attempt to justify American actions, and yet he still seeks to defend and explain them, and make them coherent. He will try to present himself as a moderate in the decision-making, offering Air Force General Curtis Lemay’s faith in military force, specifically the power of the bomb (recall Lemay’s proposal “to bomb North Vietnam back to the stone age”), as a foil against his own, more nuanced approach. Although McNamara admits to several errors, in the end—and he emphasizes the point—these were “human” errors.

In this key sense, although this film is about Vietnam, it is more about the ways in which developments in the 20th century eventually led the United States into the swamps and jungles of Southeast Asia. There was a quagmire there, but it was a quagmire of Washington’s own making. Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers clarify the point that there were no mistakes made in Washington, only appalling miscalculations. Ellsberg’s point—and Errol Morris underlines it—makes us see that “human” errors are the only kind of errors, and that responsibility awaits those who commit them.

I have not seen the film, only heard and read about it. So tonight I am with most of you—who have yet to see the film. [At Queen’s, were I a seminar student, I would now be asked or told to leave. For among our latter-day secularized quasi Scots-Presbyterian community, there is nothing worse than being unprepared for class.] Fortunately Brown University has produced a fine teacher-student manual to accompany the film. One of the focal points of the manual is the so-called set of “lessons” to be drawn from McNamara’s testimony. As you watch McNamara recount eleven of these lessons, think and reflect upon the following terms: appeasement, collective security, colonialism, containment, domino theory, empathy, ethics, just war, morality, power, proportionality, rationality, responsibility, unilateralism, values, war criminals. And this is the short list; the test will come both during and after the film. You will be moved by this cinematic achievement, whatever your politics.

May I conclude my introduction by noting that current American president George W. Bush (whom Heather Mallick of the Globe and Mail yesterday described well as a Chihuahua gnawing at the pant leg of history) is in his reading of the world not that different from the reading Robert McNamara offers here. Put another way, Bush—Cheney—Rumsfeld--Rove—especially Bush in that terrible Tuesday night press conference—comprise a logical extension of McNamara’s world view.

Where is Karl Marx when we need him, I heard someone ask. Well, we do have Michael Moore, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Ralph Nader, Jamie Swift, and, of course, Noam Chomsky, and now Al Franken. But we also have Errol Morris, demonstrating the power of film in letting Robert McNamara speak for himself.

Where have all the flowers gone, poet and folk singer Pete Seeger asked in another time. When will they ever learn? Why can’t the United States work to make the world a safer, rather than more dangerous place?

Op ed for Whig Thursday

Some of my best friends are Jews.

Most of us have heard that line. Its usually followed by some sort of qualifier. But....

This sort of genteel anti-Semitism came to mind last week when I was talking with Sister Pauline Lally about a way to mark this years Good Friday vigil at City Hall. The Sisters of Providence have traditionally made an extra effort to make their regular Friday vigil that much more special because it falls on one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar.

We were thinking that the recent controversy surrounding Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ offered a good opportunity. Why not point out that there is another way of commemorating Christ’s death and resurrection than by dwelling obsessively, as Gibson does, on the gruesome details of torture and death?

Every week the City Hall vigil keepers recite a short prayer that ends with the words "we stand in hope. Hope for a world free of hatred and violence."

Sister Pauline remarked that Good Friday is an occasion to remember Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection. But the death of Jesus shouldn’t glorify suffering. It was meant to put an end to the suffering of the innocent. And the tradition of Catholic social teaching urges the faithful to think about ending cruelty of all kinds.

All of which reminded me of an article by Rabbi Michael Lerner that I had read just as the controversy over Gibson’s movie peaked a few weeks ago. Rabbi Lerner, the editor of the magazine Tikkun, had written that, once upon a time, it was commonplace for Christian teaching to claim that the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus.

Jews came to fear Easter, Lerner explained, because the retelling of the Crucifixion story often led to mob attacks on defenseless Jews who were blamed for having caused the suffering of Jesus.

Those days are now, thankfully, behind us. But we decided that because Good Friday so often coincides with Passover, this years Good Friday vigil would be an appropriate occasion to remember not just the events surrounding Christ’s death and resurrection but the Passover story as well. After all, that story recalls the flight of the Jews from oppression and slavery in ancient Egypt. It would be a hopeful tale for people who stand in hope.

Then, on the eve of Passover a few days ago, came the firebombing of the oldest Jewish day school in the country. The attack on the library of Montreal’s United Talmud Torah elementary school reduced some of Judaism’s most sacred texts to a smouldering ruin. The book burners also torched Charlottes Web and the Dr. Seuss collection.

The vile assault brought condemnation from all quarters, particularly since it followed the recent desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Toronto and the attempted arson of a mosque in that city.

It was all the more reason to take the opportunity of the Good Friday vigil to reach out to the Jews and Moslems of Kingston with a message of hope and peace. So we made the calls and sent around the e-mails asking as many people as possible to come down to City Hall tomorrow to stand with us.

Our message will, as always, be one of hope. The vigil-keepers have a small explanatory handout that we give to office workers, tourists and other passers-by. It’s called Why do we stand here?

On the back are the words of Margaret Mead. Never doubt that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that can.

So this Friday we have made a special effort to ask Kingston’s Jews, Moslems and indeed people from every faith community to join us in front of City Hall at noon. We will be standing beside the six-foot wooden cross that the Sisters of Providence bring along on Good Friday. It is adorned with newspaper headlines about hunger and homelessness, photographs and scriptural references such as one from Proverbs 31.8: Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute.

Of course, each faith tradition can come up with scriptural quotes and references that show a harsher view of the world, an intolerant people from each have always done so.

Some of my best friends ARE Jews. And so is my daughter. But that’s not why she and I will head down to City Hall tomorrow. We'll go because it is important to stand up against hatred whenever it pops up from the muck.

Kingston writer Jamie Swift is co-director of the Justice and Peace Office of the Sisters of Providence.

The story of the crucifixion is one of the most powerful and the most contested -- in human history. Witness the controversies that have guaranteed huge audiences for the latest movie retelling of the events on Good Friday some 2000 years ago.

There are two sides to every story. In Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ the main emphasis is on cruelty and death. Here in Kingston the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul will mark Good Friday by emphasizing hope over suffering.

Good Friday is an occasion to remember Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection, says Sister Pauline Lally. But the death of Jesus shouldn’t glorify suffering. It was meant to put an end to the suffering of the innocent. Our work for justice is part of a struggle to end to cruelty of all kinds.

The Sisters and their fellow vigil keepers have been commemorating Good Friday for the past nine years with a special silent vigil in solidarity with Kingston’s poor. It has been part of a weekly public statement of support for people affected by government cuts to the social safety net.

Good Friday often coincides with Passover, says Sister Pauline. That story recalls the flight of the Jews from oppression and slavery in ancient Egypt. But it’s also a joyous tale of liberation and deliverance.

Each week for the past nine years the vigil-keepers have stood at City Hall in silent solidarity with Kingston’s most vulnerable citizens. They hold signs like "Homes for the Homeless" and "Jobs with a Living Wage." On Good Friday, April 9, the only sign will be a six-foot cross used to symbolize the suffering of the poor.

"The Jewish Torah teaches you to love your neighbour as yourself", explains Sister Pauline. "The first Christian communities were inspired by Jesus to struggle so that there was not a needy person among them. Our cross does not symbolize the pain and suffering that Mel Gibson focuses on in his movie. We want to concentrate on liberating people from hatred and cruelty."

At a time of growing intolerance for other religions and their traditions, the Sisters of Providence and the vigil-keepers view the story of Christ’s death and resurrection from a standpoint of love and generosity. The public is invited to join the Justice and Peace Office of the Sisters of Providence on Good Friday in front of City Hall from 12:15 to 12:45.

For more information, contact Sister Pauline Lally at 544-4525 ext. 103.

• The Justice and Peace Office of the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul has been holing a silent vigil for social justice for over eight years. The vigil started after Ontario reduced social assistance payments to the poor. Every Friday Sisters and their fellow-vigil keepers gather in front of Kingston’s historic City Hall. They look out past the town’s old fortifications to the Royal Military College and Fort Henry across the mouth of the Cataraqui River.


• The Good Friday Vigil has become part of the Sisters' tradition of bearing witness. Instead of their usual signs about poverty, homelessness and war, the group stands beside a six-foot wooden cross. It is adorned with newspaper headlines, photographs and scriptural references such as "Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute"( Proverbs 31.8)


• Against Good Friday's sombre background, the message will, as always, be one of hope. The vigil-keepers have a small handout called Why do we stand here? They give it to office workers, tourists and other passers-by. On the back are the words of Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that can."


• Each week the vigil keepers say a short prayer that explains that they are standing in silent, non-violent solidarity with those affected by governments and corporations that put profits ahead of humankind and indeed ahead of all Creation. Over the years the vigil keepers have focussed on the war in Iraq and the Walkerton disaster, welfare myths and National Homelessness Action Day.


• The Friday vigils have become well-known in Kingston. Drivers honk in recognition as they drive by. Municipal politicians know that the vigil keepers will be there every week, no matter what the weather. People in the community are aware that the Sisters of Providence, who arrived in Kingston in 1861 to help the poor with their work in hospitals, are affirming that charity is not enough. Their call for social justice reflects the central principles of Catholic social teaching solidarity, human dignity and a preferential option for the poor.


• Last year the Justice and Peace Office organized a social audit in Kingston. It was part of a broader process initiated by the Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition (ISARC). The idea was to take the social pulse of our community to assess its needs and report on how governments were performing relative to the standards outlined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. They found that people are going hungry and living on the streets. Others have apartments barely fit for human habitation. Some have shelter costs that leave them without enough money to feed their families. Too many people with psychiatric ailments have insufficient community support. The book is about to be published as a result of the social audit. Lives in the Balance will be released at ISARCs Ontario Religious Leaders Forum on April 29. It will also be presented to the McGuinty government at that time.

Geoff has been honoured with not one but two teaching awards. He received the PHED 88 Teaching Award at a departmental ceremony on March 25, 2004. A short time later, he discovered that he had also been named this year's recipient of the Frank Knox Teaching Award. You can read the full story here. Congratulations Geoff!

Geoff thanks all of his students, colleagues at Queen's and throughout the world, especially those of you who pushed him as hard as they did. This gave him the kind of impetus necessary to do what he has to do. Merci beaucoup.

From the Queen's Journal: "The following quotations were pulled from the class surveys conducted for the two teachers who won the Frank Knox award. They are from anonymous students who lauded their professors for excellent teaching:"

"I have never seen a teacher (in any level of my schooling) so committed to engaging with their students. Every class, Dr. Smith checks in with students, asks them what they thought of a recent news event, or relevant documentary, or how school is going in general."

"Geoff Smith is someone who has inspired me to guide my own education and pursue my interests while maintaining a social conscience and questioning the world around me."

Are you a past or present student of Geoff's? Please share your thoughts and experiences on our website's guestbook or leave a comment on Geoff's blog.

Just over a year ago, some 10 million people in over 600 cities around the world came together to oppose the proposed invasion of Iraq. Here in Kingston more than 800 marchers took to the streets, the biggest peace march in Kingston's history. Our concerns have been validated. The flimsy pretext turned out to be a threadbare curtain of lies. But we have no desire to sit back and utter a complacent "We told you so".

A poll released this week showed that an stunning 80 per cent of Canadians believe that we did the right thing by refusing to join the attack on Iraq. A poll in November last year showed that 69% Canadians oppose Canadian participation in the Nuclear Missile Defense programme. The rally this Saturday is called under the slogan "we still say no to war", but the message from the protest will also reiterate that Canadian's don't want their country to participate in dismantling the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty by joining the openly aggressive agenda of the militarization of space, through the NMD system.

The March 20th protest in Kingston will be one of more than 50 similar events across Canada.

The march in Kingston is being endorsed by Queen's Against War, Peace Kingston, OPIRG, Kingston District Labour Council, Ban Righ Centre, Kingston NDP, Kingston Greens, Polaris Institute, Queen's Palestinian Human Rights Association, Society of Graduate and Professional Students at Queen's, Council of Canadians (Kingston Chapter), Food-Not-Bombs...

Contact: QueensAgainstWar@hotmail.com (544-5652).