The Social Emancipation of Weapons Manufacturing Executives

I was supposed to participate in the new Filmonik workshop this week but for the past couple of days I've had a strange fever that seems to come and go. It's quite unusual, other people can actually feel the heat coming off of my skin like a tummo meditator yet I'm not sweating. I've had some problems with my memory, my coordination and I feel like sleeping for the next week but instead I'll stay in bed and write.

During this precious recovery time I've been looking at the statcounter of my human rights ezine World Women International and I've noticed some hits from surprising locations during the summer period. On the 9^th of August at 16:10 GMT I had a hit from The Boeing Company, the world's largest weapons manufacturer ($28,050,000,000 in military equipment sales annually) from the IP address 130.76.32.144, which tells me that it was from their Everett Factory, the world's largest structure by volume where they assemble most of their "goods." The second unusual hit was only a week later from the headquarters of the Northrop Grumman Corporation, the world's second largest weapons manufacturer ($27,590,000,000 in military equipment sales annually) on the 16^th of August 2010 at 18:08 GMT from their headquarters in California, IP address 157.127.155.214.

It warms my heart that large weapon's manufacturers are interested in international women's rights. Corporate social responsibility is increasing ever more these days, benefiting the business world in so many ways, providing a perspective broader and more far reaching than their own immediate, short-term profits.

The blokes at Boeing were particularly interested in my editorial “The Dichotomy of Women's Rights in Indonesia” whilst the employees of Northrop Grumman were more interested in my article “Rape As A Political Weapon.” I envisage the social enlightenment they provided spreading like wildfire throughout their companies, transforming their thoughts to new postulates of corporate social responsibility that will metamorphosize the way they do business.

Now I'm going to have a cup of Ayurvedic Chocolate Tea and talk to my cat whilst I work on my new novel “The Souls of Objects,” a story about spiritual awakening, sexual politics, compartmentalization, altered consciousness and the search for meaning in a world where it seems even souls can become objects...

Open Your Eyes

I've recently completed a short documentary 'Trafficking in Misery: The Road to Modern Day Slavery" which is going to be used for a conference on sex trafficking held by Advocates 4 Women in New York. I met the activists involved with this cause at the National Organization for Women's Trafficking Action Network, a dedicated team of people from diverse backgrounds who are raising awareness of this issue. I was shocked to find that federal legislation against human trafficking was only enacted in the year 2000 and that New York state has only recently enacted anti-trafficking laws in 2007.

The individual stories of the victims are heartwrenching and brutal, most people are unaware of the scope of this problem and how these people exist all around us yet their plight is almost invisible due to lack of awareness. When we do hear of such crimes we somehow perceive this to be an exagerration when it is in fact a brutal reality. One activist discovered the truth after finding his favorite Asian restaurant on the front cover of his local paper, uncovered as a labor trafficking ring. Most people do not know what signs to look for in a victim or who to contact when they suspect this activity, an issue which must be addressed by more educational campaigns. Before the recent legislation came into effect the victim was more likely to get arrested than the trafficker who was exploiting them, another reason why people may be reluctant to report this crime.

A couple of hundred years ago a slave could be purchased for the modern day equivalent of $40,000 but today a human can be purchased for $300 and net a trafficker up to $67,000 per year in profit, the victims effectively become 'disposable people' who are easily replacable and very likely to be killed if they become difficult to manage. Criminals operate with impunity around the world due to lack of awareness and legislation; shockingly the United Nations has been allocated only $50 million dollars per year to combat this multi-billion dollar industry. NGOs estimate that 27 million people per year are in modern day slavery but due to the limited resources they have to investigate the problem this may be only the tip of the iceberg.

A young activist I met at an Amnesty meeting in West Harlem once asked "what is it that happens in the time between when someone is a little boy and a man that would allow him to perpetrate such brutality?" It brought me back to Hannah Arendts assessment of the banality of evil which in this case may be more aptly termed the casualness of psychopathy; these crimes are profit driven and those who commit them see their victims as less than human which in their twisted thinking somehow makes this acceptable. Like Eichmann, who showed no trace of hatred for Jewish people and had wanted only to advance his career the people who perpetrate these crimes operate on the same mechanical level where brutality is the norm and the people they victimise are not assigned personhood.

The uncounted numbers in the human trafficking statistics also cover the recently reported white collar sex trafficking connected to private defence companies, first discovered by NGOs after a report from a brothel client who overheard another one say "mine couldn't have been more than 12" after engaging in sex with a minor. In countries such as Iraq such establishments are often disguised as hair dressers, restaurants, shops and other seemingly mundane places which operate as fronts; the victims are estimated to be in the tens of thousands. Children and women who are trafficked in these types of societies face the additional stigma of compromised chastity in which the victim is blamed, which makes it a very difficult issue to monitor and address.

The psychological condition that is created in women who have been victims of this crime from an early age can make it difficult to identify them as victims of trafficking. Often they have resigned themselves to this life because the person who trafficked them has brainwashed them into believing they will not be accepted back home and the combination of prolonged psychological and physical abuse eventually leads them to be compliant even when they are no longer held captive. I was once a proponent of the Dutch system which allows legal prostitution in designated areas because my relatives in the Netherlands told me there was a sharp decrease in rapes and other types of crime in residential areas when this was implemented many decades ago; it seemed to be a logical system. It is only recently that extensive studies of sex workers have shown that a majority of them have been subjected to childhood sexual abuse, perhaps with the intention of grooming them for such work. The research also found that the legalisation of brothels in various areas around the world almost always led to a parallel trade in child exploitation, the Swedish model of zero tolerance is based partly on this body of research. Their method of how to deal with the problem also poses a solution that might be adopted by the governments of other countries, it is not the prostitute who is arrested but the client who then gets a big red envelope containing a writ delivered to his home. This makes it a less appealing activity for the potential client and far easier for law enforcement to obtain evidence from victims who have been trafficked.

Now I am going to have some herbal tea and clear my mind. Then onto the second phase of Equanimity Productions which will have it's home at equanimity.tv in a few weeks, more bite sized documentaries and dramas about human rights issues around the world.

View: 'Trafficking in Human Misery: The Road to Modern Day Slavery' narrated and directed by Naomi Pattirane

The Search for Seed Funding

Today I've entered the pitch for my new drama to Kickstarter.com but as they're in beta at the moment I won't know immediately whether my project will be accepted. In the meantime I've made a separate site to raise funding; childrenofguantanamo.wordpress.com.

For the past several weeks I've been in New York staying with my father and attending endless hospital appointments with my mother who is suffering from heart failure. I've been isolating myself socially as a result and my stay has been a bit like Anne Frank meets Sex in the City (minus the sex). This is the first summer I've spent in my hometown since 1993 and I wish I could extend my stay a bit longer but the change fee will be $300, a princely sum whilst I can barely afford a cup of coffee. The best I can do is pray for volcanic ash.

Today the search for a quiet place for an internet connection has been more like The Search for Spock but I can't complain; my tumours are gone, I'm walking again and my hometown is a beautiful place even in the 90 degree summer heat.

Cold Molasses in Zero Weather

When talking to a friend yesterday I realised that although I feel like I'm functioning at a fraction of the speed I ought to, what my American grandmother used to refer to as "going uphill like cold molasses in zero degree weather," in fact I have achieved more in the last five weeks I have been recovering from my operation than I did in the previous year. I've started four online magazines which I've now incorporated into Northern Quarter Publishing and through this I'm meeting some amazing people who are very inspiring to me.

It's funny how people can devalue themselves because of others people's prejudices or false perceptions and take it on board as part of their own thought process. I've recently started to omit negative influences from my life and it's made a big difference to the way I feel mentally and emotionally, negative people can become like a vortex draining your emotional energy and although they may be so-called friends or aquaintances they always somehow seem to devalue everything you do through their perception of the world.

In my own life I find these are often people who have been molly-coddled throughout their lives and don't understand the difficult journey and the obstacles that many less advantaged people have managed overcome. I am often percieved as middle class when in fact I grew up in one room tenemants and SROs in New York. My highschool had such a serious gun problem it had to install airport style metal detectors and grown adults used to walk two streets around it to avoid the children. Coming from my background and simply being in one piece is a miracle that I do not take for granted so I have great empathy for anyone who has had to truly struggle through life. When my very middle class friend constantly complains about her weight as if it were of the same signifigance as wife-beating or back street abortions I wonder where her mind is; this is an educated person who has no concept of the world beyond herself and I think this is sad. It also becomes a kind of mantra that affects everyone around her because the tune never changes, I loved her like a sister but our relationship seemed to consist of mutual complaints and now it seems to have run its very long course. I hope she changes and I wish her the best but it still makes me sad as well, some people claim to want change in their lives but in reality they are in their comfort zone. It takes a lot of effort to refocus and this can sometimes seem overwhelming but without the willingness to do so then there is no hope.

So now I'm concentrating on other women around the world, I've started adding content to my new online magazine World Women International | www.worldwomeninternational.com and I'm seeking submissions from human rights journalists around the world. If you are a woman who can write articles of 800-2000 words without complaining about your cellulite I'd be very interested to hear from you.

A New Decade

I was hoping to achieve more in my two months back home in New York but most of my time was spent with my elderly parents, which was really the entire point of the journey. I feel more spiritually refreshed although I am now on crutches due to an operation to remove another hopefully benign soft tissue tumour from my knee. I'm on a combo of diclofenac, paracetamol and codiene for the pain and I cannot take my Zonisamide at the moment because it is so sedating I cannot navigate on the crutches!

I managed to write one short story "Kinesis" and start a new installment of Catticus which has a far more comic turn than the last one. When I was in New York I joined Amnesty International's Women's Human Rights Action Team which started to meet up for a book club before I left, the book of the month was "Half the Sky" written by Pulitzer Prize winning human rights jounalists Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn. It tells the story of women who have endured some of the worst abuses and conditions on the planet, how they perservered and managed to overcome their oppressors and the hard struggle to survive, even for those who have managed to beat the odds. The story of the women of the untouchable Dalit village reminded me of the vigilante Gulabi Gang, who I heard about on the BBC website;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7068875.stm

This has inspired me to start a screenplay about their story and I hope I can do it justice.

Tonight I'm going to finish reading this book and I also have another project in the pipeline, an online magazine called Tokyo Cyberpunk Quarterly. Submissions are welcome, please email short stories or poetry to tokyocyberpunk@rocketmail.com

Clarity

This month my goal is to write and direct my first rough five minute short to submit as part of my application for a commision to produce my first dramatic digital short. It's a competition for the British Film Council and there is a possibility of a £12,000 budget up for grabs but I won't hold my breath. I'll just consider it an exercise in creativity as I'm probably too off-beat and too "foreign" to get my paws on any arts council funding. I'd probably have better luck selling gimp masks on eBay.

Last night Jackson came with me to do some lighting tests at Manchester Airport so I wouldn't look like the Puerto Rican wing of Al Quaeda canvassing the area with my video camera. The tunnels and the lighting in certain areas are particularly atmospheric, great for sci-fi themes and quite inspiring, it would be easy to produce a decent looking short film with a very low budget at this location but security restrictions mean that you can't really linger very long and you certainly couldn't bring tons of lighting equipment or boom microphones. Every shot would have to be carefully thought out and choreographed beforehand.

I've been thinking about the space in which dreams and reality overlap, as usual of course but I would have to condense this into a five to seven minute short and I have to get it done pronto as I plan to submit two proposals, one for a drama which I have not yet concieved and one for a documentary about the children of Guantanomo, a subject which suprisingly seldom gets press:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minors_detained_in_the_global_war_on_terror

I'm writing a full length fictionalized drama based on the Camp Iguana detainees and some of the research I am doing for this will be the basis for my work.

I guess I'd better get cracking now. I've had some difficulty with my concentration over the past couple of days so now I'm taking ProPlus caffeine tablets which seem to help but I have to take about four at a time to offset the Zonisamide. These along with Pepsi Max and Nescafe and I'm ready to go amigo!

 

Headspace

Although I'm certain it's a creative distraction rather than a clinical disorder I have the constant sensation of my head heating up. I feel as if I want to buy a giant helmut shaped ice pack and wear it whilst I write to alleviate the feeling that my head is in the defrost mode of a giant microwave oven. This is a diversion from my internal dialogue that I do not need when I am trying to write for long stretches at a time and it is very frustrating. I may need to go to the Writer's Hospital.

The first writers block exercise which I leave until I'm at the brink of desperation is to choose a lot of disconnected words from an unabridged dictionary. I spend about a half hour randomly opening pages choosing words I like, jotting them down and when I'm done I write a lot of random paragraphs and string them together to make a surreal short story. It's easier than choosing a theme when you're feeling depressed or uninspired and often it can get the ball rolling.

At the moment I'm away from home and I find that just a change of scenery can often be more inspiring, even though I'm just an hour down the road. I now have a list of different places in which I'm going to try to do some writing to see if I'm a bit more productive.

Most of my life I've had vivid dreams which I've been able to remember upon waking and which inspired me creatively but lately I find that I'm having these less often and need something more to ignite my creativity. 

I have turned to the British Cheese Board's "Cheese and Dreams" study which concluded that the amino acid tryptophan in cheese enhanced sleep and that stilton cheese in particular caused bizarre dreams in 85% of the women participants. I had previously considered a trip to Amsterdam to try magic mushrooms but as these are now outlawed I think I may have to settle for the mouldy cheese instead.