My Favorite Member of Congress is Gone (But Not Forgotten)
What Cynthia McKinney Means to Me

http://www.counterpunch.org/donham10072006.html

By MARK DONHAM
10/7/2006

Yeah, I'm upset with the fact that the powers that be have not so gently thrown Cynthia McKinney out of her seat in Congress, just about the time the Democrats may take over. It's a gross injustice, sleazy, and we are a worse country for it. It's not the kind of message that the Democrats should want to be sending at this time, but they did little to prevent it, and probably encouraged it. Why?

I grew up in New Baden, Illinois in the 1950s and 60s. New Baden is a small town, at the time somewhere between 1500 and 2000 people. New Baden literally straddles the border between Clinton and St. Clair counties, about 30 some miles east of St. Louis. Most of New Baden is in Clinton County, and it is generally considered to be in Clinton County. St. Clair County is the infamous "metro-east" area represented for years by the late Congressional powerhouse Mel Price, including the now almost entirely black city of E. St. Louis, the hometown of my dad.

Clinton County, however, is a county of small towns about every five miles--the county seat is Carlyle, population maybe 5,000 and home of the Carlyle Lake reservoir, the largest in Illinois. It is a unique county in that it is heavily settled by German-Catholic farmers. These very serious and competent people, with good land and a favorable climate, were able to establish and keep family farms over many generations. The small towns, ranging in size from several hundred to several thousand, are characterized by large, ornate catholic churches, with very tall steeples. The one in New Baden, St. George, looks like some kind of gothic cathedral. We grew up distinguishing between the "publics" and the "catholics." I was a public.

Clinton County in general had very little racial diversity at that time. (Still doesn't) No, Illinois didn't have "Jim Crow" outwardly. I didn't grow up with separate water fountains, bathrooms, counters, and the such. No, I would only encounter that on my first trip to Florida to visit my grandmother in 1962. That blatant racial prejudice was pretty shocking to me. I was much more used to a quieter, subtle kind where you try to pretend that you weren't being prejudiced.

In our region there were a handful of African-Americans in a few of the towns, but most didn't have any. New Baden sure didn't. There were all kinds of whispers about black people amongst us kids growing up. Even though there was Scott AFB nearby, which is a major military installation, and we often got transient military families coming through our schools, they were always white. We always thought that if a black family tried to move into New Baden, that they would get the message real quick they weren't welcome. That may have happened a time or two--I seem to recall it.

This kind of attitude got some not so subtle as well as subtle reinforcement from our adult leaders. For example, a varsity basketball coach from our consolidated high school was quoted as saying to his players that he "never saw a nigger that couldn't sing, dance, or play ball." The long time biology teacher at the high school, in preparation for an annual biology class trip to Shaw's Gardens in St. Louis, (now the Missouri Botanical Gardens) famously reminded us "not to yell at the 'brownies' when we drove through East St. Louis." There was more, believe me. It was a constant reinforcement of racial prejudice that I grew up.

I never liked it. I never was comfortable with it. I usually just sat there in silence when all this was going on. The fact is that I had some heros who were black men when I was growing up. For example, Curt Flood. I guess a lot of people know about Curt Flood, but a lot probably don't. Curt Flood was centerfielder for the Cards. You don't grow up with a dad who comes from East St. Louis who is a baseball nut and coach, and not be a Cards fan. Well, I guess there's a few traitors, but not many.

Curt Flood was as good a centerfielder as there was in the majors. (back in the long forgotten days when the national league was better than the other league.) Just ask Willie Mays--he'll tell you, and Willie was the best! Curt could do everything--field, hit, run, throw, entertain. That's why I was shocked when the Cards tried to trade him. Who would have ever guessed that such a great player would be traded, let alone "blackballed?" And now what he asked for--not to be treated like property, occurs as a matter of course through "free agency." This was one of my first experiences of a black person I admired getting the shaft. I was too young to really understand what was going on.

But Curt Flood wasn't the only black person I admired as I grew up. Dick Gregory had a huge impact on me at a very key point in my life. When I was 19 and a freshman at Western Illinois University, Dick Gregory came to speak. He was just beginning to get some attention as an entertainer. And while he was a "controversial" character, he got access to the state universities of Illinois because he had recently graduated from Southern Illinois University as an all-star track and field athlete. That was my good fortune.

I've seen Dick Gregory speak 3 times now in person. He's totally awesome. When he speaks, he repeats a key phrase--the main point of his talk--repeatedly throughout the talk at strategic times, in different tones and inflections, to help drill home the point. The first time I heard him, his "mantra" to us college kids was "you have a big job ahead of you." He was referring to turning around the corruption, greed, ignorance, prejudice, and violence of our society. He was so right. "fter hearing him that first time, in 1970, at WIU, I became a vegetarian and have never gone back to eating meat. I became an activist. His influence on me was one of the strongest of an outside advisor, and I'm proud to say that.

And what about Miles Davis? Miles came from East St. Louis, the home town of my dad, and one of the most creative, enigmatic, charismatic musicians ever. Being a horn player myself, I fell in love with Miles Davis. He was cool. And of course there were Dr.and Mrs. King, Aretha Franklin, and many other black people that were top-notch heros to me as I grew up. So as I have grown up with these outstanding black role models, I have just had a hard time dealing with the prejudice. I didn't want to be prejudice. I wanted to be like them! And while at the beginning of my life, I didn't actually live around African-Americans, and had very limited contact, now I actually live in a region where there are a number of black people and I have been able to experience first hand what goes in such a community. I now have regular, although still somewhat limited contact with black people in the community. What I see and feel is that, while most white people think that things are "better than they were," there is still a lot of room for improvement in black/white relations, and African-Americans in general still face significant obstacles in life that most white people in general don't. And, it is just plain wrong to think that all of our nation's racial problems have been solved or are even near to being solved.

* * *

And then there is the forest protection movement. I wouldn't have guessed how important forests would become to me, and that I would have ended up buying land adjacent to a national forest. I also wouldn't have guessed that trying to stop the U.S. Forest Service from allowing our national forests to be destroyed by a variety of ills would become at least part of my employment. But it did, and with it, conferences, conference calls, meetings, etc. etc. etc. Networking, organizing, working in teams, working toward consensus on issues. Like any political movement, there is a lot of give and take, working together with other people. Typically, this working together, networking, organizing, etc. occurs between white people when you deal with national forests. I know it can't be because only white people care about public lands, and I know it isn't because the activists in the forest protection movement don't like nor want diversity in their ranks. But that's how it is. That, however, could (and probably should) be the subject of a whole separate paper.

When I first started getting educated about national forests, which was in the early 1980s, there were certain baseline beliefs that we were all lead to accept as unchangeable. Two of those were that there would be logging of some sort on the national forests, and that off road vehicles would be allowed to be used at some time or another. I guess that has pretty much remained true, although not everywhere.

These beliefs became challenged, at first by visionaries like the late Dr. Bob Klawitter, from Protect our Woods, an Indiana-based grassroots environmental organization formed around 1985 to give local input into the first Hoosier national forest plan. Dr. Klawitter, at the first Heartwood Forest Council, held in 1991 in Southern Illinois, laid out a perfect case as to why logging shouldn't be allowed on our national forests. Heartwood itself was formed in 1990 specifically to fill the advocacy void because none of the national or even local groups would publicly come out for a flat out ban on logging and off road vehicles on national forests. This was still considered a little far out for most.

Our activist community was getting convinced, especially on our small national forests of the Ohio Valley, because people with academic credentials such as Klawitter were making irrefutable arguments on behalf of such a policy. But, even among our allies, it was a hard sell to get people to go public stating that they thought there should be no logging or off road vehicles on the national forests, even though there had been repeated media coverage about how the Forest Service lost hundreds of millions of dollars nationally each year selling trees from the national forests. And as far as taking on the ORVers, we all knew that they were tearing up the national forests, but in most places they were entrenched and taking them on, well that would have been just plain suicidal. So we took positions like stopping clearcutting and limiting off road vehicles to certain trails.

But the sad fact was and still is that the National Forest Management Act, the law that (still) governs our national forests, allows all kinds of logging and off road vehicles, with what is fundamentally very few restrictions. And, sadly enough, Congress, with many member's pockets full of timber and ORV industry's hefty campaign contributions, gives a lot of money to the Forest Service to subsidize these activities on national forests for the benefit of their clientele.

On top of that, with judicial review of Forest Service actions governed under the Administrative Procedures Act, only those actions that are "arbitrary and capricious" are overturned by the courts. Arbitrary and capricious means that the agency has to do something really really illegal to get caught, not just plain ol' illegal. Furthermore, under that standard, if the agency calls one of their people an "expert" in a certain subject, and he or she has some kind of college degree to back it up, his or her word then becomes more important, whether or not he/she truly is an "expert" in that subject, than the word of a real independent expert in the subject who may come to a completely different conclusion about an issue. Furthermore, you are limited in the evidence the judge can see to a written record which the agency has compiled in the light most favorable to them. And then there are the judges--often conservative and not well educated in issues like "biodiversity," "habitat fragmentation," or "conserving an endangered species." Even many Democratic-Presidentially appointed judges don't get it. Add it all up, and it means that there's a lot of bad things occurring on our national forests and not a lot of defense against it.

There were some early champions that saw this and tried to get Congress to strengthen the laws governing the national forests. Ned Fritz, a forest lover and attorney from Dallas, Texas, is a very courageous visionary for his time in this regard. Ned was doing all he could to try to craft new legislation that will fill at least some of the most egregious gaps in the NFMA. He went so far in the early 1980s as to fly in a small plane all over the country with a photographer to different national forests documenting horrific clearcuts. Ned, now in his 90s, was and still is determined to stop clearcutting, or the mass cutting of all trees across large areas, on national forests. He crafted legislation that, if passed, would prohibit clearcutting, make it easier to sue the Forest Service, and put some further restrictions on "selective" logging, or the practice of picking specific trees throughout the forest for logging but not cutting every tree. Ned's legislation never passed.

Then a group called "Save America's Forests" started in D.C. with the goal of lobbying for new national forest legislation. Their bill, after several evolutions, ended up picking up a lot of Ned Fritz's ideas, with some increased restrictions on logging. That bill, which would not, as their authors admit, stop all the logging on the national forests, has been introduced a few times, but it's kind of dormant now, as its top advocates are pretty much waiting for the Democrats to take at least one of the chambers of Congress. John Kerry had endorsed the bill. It's an easy position to take. A politician could claim that they were doing something for the environmental protection of the national forests but in reality, since the bill doesn't restrict the volumes that can be cut from the national forests, the politician can also tell the timber industry not to get heartburn over it, that the timber would still be coming. It avoids the hard questions about losing money on timber sales, and what our public forests are really worth to the public. But the bill does have some support, and some knowledgeable people in the movement believe that it will be a version of the Save America's Forest bill is the one that has the best chance to get through even a Democratically controlled but timber industry compromised Congress.

End Part I