New Clear Vision

Fighting for Reproductive Justice for Women in Prison

by Tina Reynolds and Victoria Law

“I never thought of advocating outside of prison. I just wanted to have some semblance of a normal life once I was released,” stated Tina Reynolds, a mother and formerly incarcerated woman. Then she gave birth to her son while in prison for a parole violation:

“When I went into labor, my water broke. The van came to pick me up, I was shackled. Once I was in the van, I was handcuffed. I was taken to the hospital. The handcuffs were taken off, but the shackles weren’t. I walked to the wheelchair that they brought over to me and I sat in the wheelchair with shackles on me. They re-handcuffed me once I was in the wheelchair and took me up to the floor where women had their children.

“When I got there, I was handcuffed with one hand. At the last minute, before I gave birth, I was unshackled so that my feet were free. Then after I gave birth to him, the shackles went back on and the handcuffs stayed on while I held my son on my chest.” (more…)

To Government Officials, Law Enforcement Employees, people of the University of California,  and Occupy the Farm community — and to all humanity in general…

by Pancho Ramos-Stierle

That we live now in an economy and society that are not sustainable is not the fault only of governments, administrations of public institutions, and corporations armed with political power, heavy equipment and police enforcement.

We all are implicated. 

We all, in the course of our daily (economic, educational, and social) life, consent to it, whether or not we approve of it. This is because of the increasing abstraction and unconsciousness of our connection to our economic sources in the land, the land-communities, the land-use economies, and the way we learn.

First, I would like to offer a set of questions, intended to facilitate the process of “farming truth and love,” and specifically in relation to recent events around the Occupy the Farm movement and its experience with UC-Berkeley: (more…)

Promoting Personal and Communal Responsibility

by Windy Cooler

“Bite this stick,” the doctor might have said as we birthed our children a hundred years ago. The grunting,  whimpering, sobbing, pleading, sweating, stinking, bleeding nudity of motherhood channeled into that sweet gag, silent, as the towels mount to soak up all of the  nasty animal we are as we labor with the promise of life. Bite this stick.

To date, my most popular blog entry (Of Mice and Moms), is one in which I refuse the bite the stick. It is  vaguely about Mother’s Day and it is, honestly, the kind of screaming that does not produce life. Birth is a channeling of the pain, down, not up into the air,  pushing through it, sinking, a kind of focus that for all the animal smell, is what is truly animal. But the response from other mothers, and even fathers,  people in general, to my scream was huge.  I was a little taken aback. We are angry. We are sad. (more…)

Let’s Get on With Our Lives…

by Robert C. Koehler

Nothing fills an emotional void quite like the piercing drone of bagpipes. No matter the kids were rolling their eyeballs as they shuffled two-by-two into the stifling field house — this was profound, and I was on the verge of tears.

Oh, there she is. My daughter. Gulp. Eighteen years old. A college student. I stifled the impulse to wave and embarrass her still further. We had fleeting eye contact, then she turned to the business of finding her seat, one of almost 500 reluctant stars of this event.

I sympathized with their reluctance. Ceremony is about the past, not the future; and the past, represented by a thousand graying moms and dads looking on from the bleachers, wasn’t quite ready to let them go. It had them in its loving tangle. They were making the best of it.

I knew how self-conscious I would have been. All weekend I’d been reliving my own undergraduate career. The previous night, after arriving in St. Paul — a seven-hour trek from Chicago — we’d gone to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant and I couldn’t shut up about the old days, and the wonder that I had survived them. (more…)

Falling into the Poles…

by Windy Cooler

The color and quality of the light here is, I don’t know, dense. I always feel like I am being pushed into myself, quieting, sinking, falling through what is me and through the floor of the Earth when I walk alone here, visiting what seem like the ruins of the civilization I was part of eons ago, like the last survivor of Pompeii, when it was I who left. This is Montgomery, Alabama.

This is where I was a teenager and where I spent my early years as a mother, the place where I worked as a projectionist in a neighborhood theater, a non-profit one screen art house, called The Capri. Alabama is where my mother’s family has lived since before the American Civil War, in a small, ever flooding town called Elba, just north of Mobile. I am hardly a survivor as I burn and push through. I used to fancy myself one, feeling the need to keep on breathing through poverty and constant shaming, breathing and birthing a creature I could be proud of. The irony though is that surviving made me ashamed. And birthing is falling too. (more…)

Removing ‘War’ from the History Books?

by Matt Meyer

As any good teacher should do on weekends, I have been preparing for my New York State Regents-based course in United States History. In light of last week’s revelations that the New York City Department of Education (the largest such public bastion of knowledge in the country) has sent out a list of proposed words to be avoided in the creation of tests, the scope of my new curriculum might end up looking something like this:

After the Revolutionary Skirmish of 1776, there were great debates about the founding principles of the new nation. As the thirteen colonies became thirteen states, questions of representation became especially heated when Southern state leaders asserted the need for the continuation of freedom-less-ness for people of African descent. Eventually, a Civil Hostility took place, which saw an end to vassalage. This helped pave the way for the US to become an even more respected power, but it did not truly become an international force until involvement in World Big Fight One. (more…)

Seeking Unity Across Sex, Race, and Class

by Diane Lefer

In an era when we see the faces of women, people of color, gay and lesbian people and people with disabilities among the 1%,”All the movements we have founded for our liberation are now represented in the establishment,” said women’s rights and anti-racist activist Selma James, “but we are not.”

And we remain unlikely to prevail without unity.

James, born in New York, one-time resident of South LA, veteran of anti-colonial struggles in the Caribbean, and now UK-based, was back in the US to launch her new book, Sex, Race and Class — The Perspective of Winning. As the keynote speaker at the Teach-In, “Sex, Race & Class: What Are the Terms of Unity?” on Saturday, March 24 at the Southern California Library in South LA, she drew on  decades of organizing experience to talk about how to bridge the divide among the different sectors that make up the 99%.

The answer may well be “Money.” Not as the root of all evil, but the source of both autonomy and commonality. (more…)