I Know Why the Caged Birds Scream

(Originally published in Satya Magazine, February 2006)

Three women walked past the electrified fence and onto the Happy Hens Egg World compound, which confines 220,000 hens in rusty cages 60 miles west of Melbourne, Australia. As the women began documenting the deplorable conditions in the sheds, videotaping the sights and sounds of crowded birds in constant misery, they were set upon by seven male employees of the egg factory, demanding they leave. The women agreed to leave voluntarily but the men attacked them anyway, pushing and shoving them through the dim and dusty shed.

Patty Mark and Debra Tranter just after the assault

Hearing her comrade cry out in distress, one of the activists grabbed the wall of the shed and said that she would not leave without her friend. The youngest worker grabbed both her breasts and squeezed them hard, putting his mouth next to her ear and snarling, “that made you move, didn’t it?” She screamed and fell on the floor. The men grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her body along the length of the grimy walkway.

Crossing the Mammalian-Avian Line

(Originally published in the Nov/Dec 2004 issue of Satya Magazine)

Glancing out the window, I see two elderly roosters drinking from a water bowl in the front yard. Fauna has lived with us since 2001, when he arrived in the midst of a colorful crew of roosters who had been evicted from a Pennsylvania farm. Soon after, he struck a love match with Flora, a former egg factory inmate who was one of a group of hens we called “the Anarchists” in honor of their knack for jumping over fences and redistributing wealth.

Flora and Fauna were a devoted couple until she died prematurely, her body weakened by her experiences at the factory farm. Like many aging widowers, Fauna grew socially isolated, spending more and more time indoors and less and less time doing the things he used to love to do.

Junkie Pneumonia

Originally published in the Ann Arbor Agenda in April 1992.

Please note that all statistics are from that time.

In the late 1970s, while the epidemic known as “disco fever” swept through the U.S., an epidemic known as “junkie pneumonia” raged among injection drug users in New York City. Unlike disco fever, junkie pneumonia was not the subject of intense media scrutiny or public outcry. No movies were made. Few people were aware that large numbers of injection drug users were inexplicably dying of pneumonia. Those few who did notice these deaths did not feel compelled to investigate the public health puzzle they posed. Junkies die all the time. Nor did anyone bring this less danceable epidemic to the attention of the fevered populace. Bringing the epidemic to the attention of the public would not have made much difference. Undoubtedly, some people would have voiced the opinion that people who shoot drugs deserve to die while most would have shrugged and kept dancing. Investigating the epidemic as the potential public health menace it was, however, could have had a profound impact on hundreds of thousands of lives. Had anyone bothered to investigate the deaths of these drug users, they would have found that they had an immune system disorder that we now call AIDS.

Who Would Jesus Kill?

By pattrice jones

Written on Christmas Day in 2002, this essay has been widely published and reprinted.

As the Christians gather to celebrate the birth of the founder of their religion, I find myself asking a question that I wish Christians would ask themselves: Who would Jesus kill?

Lately many Christians have been using the simple question, “What would Jesus do?” to help them make ethical judgments that are consistent with their religious beliefs. This holiday season, as Americans discuss the prospect of war over dinner tables groaning with factory farmed meat, the most apt variant of “What would Jesus do?” is: Who would Jesus kill?

Re-Membering Thanksgiving

Gloating and Gluttony Then and Now
by pattrice jones
Originally published 2004 on various IndyMedia sites.
Revises 2003 essay originally published by Press Action.

Thanksgiving, 2003 — Bush the executioner grins and pardons a turkey before flying to Iraq. He’s earned that self-satisfied smirk. All over his United States, citizens celebrate conquest over platters of flesh. Too full of turkey to think and too full of themselves to question, they let out their belts and watch TV. Tomorrow they go shopping!

***

“Body parts are everywhere!” That’s what one US soldier had to say about the saddest city in Iraq, according to an AFP report. It’s also an apt description of the state of US dinner tables during the festival of gloating and gluttony known as Thanksgiving.

This year, the United States celebrates Thanksgiving in the wake of the taking of Falluja. Waving “drumsticks” and fighting for “wishbones,” complacent Christians will gorge themselves without fear, safe from the threats of gay marriage and Iraqi self-determination. Stuffing themselves beyond satiation, they and their children will partake of the proud Puritanical tradition of ruthless, reckless expansion.

Colonization is nothing to crow about. When Columbus blundered into a hemisphere populated by 70-100 million people and countless unique species of flora and fauna, he set into motion a chain reaction of repression and rebellion that continues to this day.

Personality Complex: Eli Clare Dives Deep Into the Muddy Waters of Identity Politics

by pattrice jones

This interview and book review was originally published in the December, 1999 edition of LesbiaNation.

In her recently released book Exile & Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press), lesbian feminist and disability rights activist Eli Clare explores the political and emotional terrain of disability, class and sexual orientation by means of personal narratives. In sometimes surprising ways, Clare brings together issues that on the surface seem separate but which she sees as parts of a devastating unified field: environmental destruction and the sexual exploitation of children, homophobic violence and the economic exploitation of workers, cultural bigotry and the exploitation of natural resources.

Some of us, Clare maintains, are more scarred by these things than others, but none of us are unscathed. As she points out, our bodies can be and are “stolen, fed lies and poison, torn away from us…. Stereotypes and lies lodge in our bodies as surely as bullets.” But Clare is not content to simply catalog the damage; she insists that “the stolen body can be reclaimed.”