my world issue five

INTRODUCTION.
Welcome to my world #5. The card on the front is the Hierophant. He's like the pope or something. This zine doesn't have anything to do with the pope. He sucks. This summer marks one year I've been doing this zine. I put #4 on the last Fifteen CD which will be out octoberish(on Lookout!). I am living in Oakland once again. It is crazy here. Cupertino was very mellow. Where I live now people buy and sell crack cocaine and women at all four corners of the intersection I live at, including in our front yard. However my home is about 10 blocks from where I was born and consequently I feel a lot more grounded now. I also ended Fifteen since I put out the last issue. It had been almost 8 years, and an additional 6 years before that in two other bands. Something about being in a band makes you homeless all the time, it's really not compatible with having much of a life. I needed a break.

STILL MORE THOUGHTS ON RAPE.
Since I wrote "Further thoughts on rape and our community" in issue 1.5 I got some more information on my own situation. I had been able to remember two cases where I violated two different women. I have come in contact lately with a woman I used to hang out with in about 1986. She and I used to do speed and acid together. One night we were fooling around and we ended up more or less unclothed. It was the same situation as the other woman. By the time we were in that situation I thought consent was implied. With the aid of self-centeredness, her saying no seemed to not carry enough weight to override the implied consent of prior sexual activity.

I raped her.

Since she reminded me of this I've been thinking about why it never happened again. I've come to understand that people develop lifelong patterns pretty early on. So why didn't I ever do it again? I started to notice a progression of the behavior of the woman I related sexually to. It was obvious from pretty early on that all the women I was with had been incested/molested as kids. When I was in the beginning of adolescence the women I was with seemed to get very petrified by any kind of sexual activity. As though it was bringing up old trauma. Then as we all got older something changed. The women I was with were a little older (as I was) and had already started to have some prior sexual activities with others. There seemed to be a flip from being terrified of it to throwing ourselves into it. A lot of the time it seemed to be two people who didn't even really want to be with each other would be sexual just because they were both available for it that day. It really seems now like this:
You are a boy/girl who was molested as a child. You cut this part of your experience off. You hit puberty and the hormones start going. The prospect of being sexual with someone is terrifying. You start ending up in situations where your spending time with someone you like and end up with totally contradictory feelings. You start to fool around, it's re-traumatizing you. You avoid situations like that for a while. However, your friends start giving you hell about why your still a virgin. You have a natural need to want to fulfill what is expected of you. You've gone through all the training that says your only a real man/woman if your having lots of sex. After a while something flips over and sexual activity becomes common place, even compulsive. It seems like when primary care givers in our childhood sexualize us we think for the rest of our lives that we need abusive or trivial or meaningless or overly casual sexual relations in order that we be taken care of and our needs be met. I guess I'm bringing all of this up because it's always in my face no matter where I am. The activist/punk community in Berkeley/Oakland almost all seem to fit in this "category". So to deal with it people take on the theory from the 60s(or was it from the Roman ruling class) that sexual relations should be totally noncommittal, emotionally uninvolved. They have built an ideology where, when people are in a committed relationship, that nessicarily means they are imprisoning each other. There seems to be almost no recognition of the fact that if a person has access to both his/her male and female energy then there would be no reason to trap someone else in a relationship. There would be no illusion of something missing, that needs to be gotten from the other. Anyway, it seems like the way sex is happening, compulsively and without caring, is akin to retraumatizing the people involved. Not to mention the possibilities of HIV transmission. For these reasons I can't really invest to heavily in either of these groups any more. But, back to the original point. I raped a friend of mine. Why would I do that? I've never hit anybody since I was four. I've never been in a fight in my life. I've never been able to see other people fight without intervening. I get totally uncomfortable being around people acting inconsiderately of other people. So why could I think that it was OK to do that to her?

I found only a few answers.
(These are not intended to remove responsibilities for my actions. They are put here in hopes that maybe other men will be able to recognize similar behavior in themselves, so they can attempt to change.)

1. DEFINITION
No matter what sort of public service announcements the TV/newspaper/school gods may put out about date rape, the overwhelming image portrayed of rape is that of a stranger attacking a woman he doesn't know. This one put some wrong ideas in my head:
It's not rape if you know the person.
If your not hitting them or tearing their clothes off it's not rape.
If they consented to petting earlier that day it's not rape.
If you have had intercourse with them before then they are obliged to give you sex whenever you demand.

None of these things could explain to me why I could live with causing another person suffering in that situation and not in any other situations. The answer I found to that was two-fold.

2. PORNOGRAPHY and MALE-SUPREMECY
When I was four I started finding Playboy Puzzles in the cupboards and my parents home. After that I found magazines. After that I started finding the Spectator ( a local porno - newspaper) lying around the playground at my school. Then some of my friends somehow possessed other pornography, I guess they stole it from their fathers or something. As I got older I came to understand that all three cases of my violating a woman, had some relation to pornography. I learned a very important lesson from all of this material, male-supremecy. In the same fashion that white men get to own children and non-whites, they also get to own women. This thinking is totally linked and reinforced by pornography. The very fact that the women are no longer human and are instead a piece of paper makes ownership possible. You can own a piece of paper. You can make the piece of paper do whatever you want. You don't ask the piece of paper about consent. The nature of what the pictures portray facilitates the thinking further. In the photo's the women are always starving for sex. Unsafe sex. Violent sex. Humiliating sex. Degrading sex.

There is one particular element of male supremacy in the pictures. The woman is always dominated by or in a state of worship of the the male penis. In the photos and the films the woman is always portrayed as though the only thing that matters to her is having a man come in or on her. This pretty much eliminates any thinking where sex can happen without intercourse or be anything but intercourse. I think what this stuff did to my consciousness is got me to think that once someone consented to kissing or petting that if they said they didn't want intercourse, for whatever reason, I would then think that they didn't mean it or that they would change thier mind after penetration had happened.

I don't know what all this means to you but I have heard of a policy at Antioch College in Ohio where they have defined different levels of sexual behavior and it is mandatory to obtain mutual consent to move to higher levels. The punishment for not complying would be expulsion. I don't know about rules and people's lives but I thought it was a very interesting idea.

I read a lot of this stuff in a book called REFUSING TO BE A MAN by John Stoltenberg. Compulsory reading for all men(if I were god). It's published by Meridian.

I also wanted to express some gratitude to Spitboy, Fugazi, Los Crudos, Spark zine, Rock Candy zine, Spirals Upward zine, Fern zine for raising these issues in the punk scene. We didn't all end up punks because we had good childhoods and emotional health.

BRAS AND BREAST CANCER.
This summer I had the chance to go to Canada. For many years I had dreamed that I would find something magical in Canada, but I had no idea what that magical something would be. The trip was great, nice people, most I met were of a spiritual nature, the food I ate there was really healthy for the most part and very close to where I was staying there was a juice bar. It being my nature to pick up almost every piece of free literature I find, on my last day in Canada, I took a "health 'zine" from the juice bar. It wasn't until I got home did a friend of mine read one of the articles titled, "Bras and Breast Cancer" and encouraged me to read the article.

I was amazed at the information in the article, it turned out that the article was my Canadian surprise! The article was written by Sydney Ross Singer who conducted a study of 5,000 women who wore bras. Basically, she was interested in how our lifestyles make us sick, and she found one. According to the World Health Organization, 70-80 per cent of deaths in North America are due to lifestyle. Wearing a bra is definitely a lifestyle choice for most adult women and it seems to be a social obligation for many young women as they begin to develop breasts. The link between bras and breast cancer is this: On a daily basis, for the entirety of our lives, we are exposed to many hazardous and cancer-causing agents. Toxins are in our food, air, water and in all the materials in and around our bodies. These toxins are processed by our bodies through our lymphatic system and bras definitely restrict the lymph nodes that are near our arm pits. Basically, the tight construction of the bra restricts the natural operation of the lymph node and traps the toxins and poisons in our system. The study by Singer made the direct connection between the amount of time women wear bras and the occurence of breast cancer. Women who wear a bra 18 hours a day have a higher rate of breast cancer than women who wear a bra 12 hours a day. Women who wear a bra 24 hours a day have the highest rate of breast cancer. Much to my dismay, many women reported wearing a bra 24 hours a day and when I started to ask some friends about this they agreed that some of them actually wear their bras continuously, on the advise of their mothers or women friends.

I started to ask myself why did I wear a bra. To be honest, I never was really crazy about the way my breasts looked. They always seemed kind of lumpy, definitely not perfectly shaped, as I had been trained to think that they were supposed to look, (ie. breasts pushed upwards for constant male "enjoyment") But then I started to realize that I was really wearing a bra to mold my breasts so they would look like every other woman's, and I believed the lie that my breasts needed "support"...BULLSHIT!! The fact is that my breast needed support because they were lazy from always being held "up" in a bra. By lazy I mean that, like muscles that haven't been used in a while, my breasts became that way. I knew deep inside that my body was born with everything I needed to get along in life and I wasn't born with a bra on!

Then came the decision, like many other things in my life there comes a time to reject the idea that I've carried around for years, the lies I've been taught by society about how to take care of myself. I decided to get rid of the bra. There are a couple of factors that helped me in this decision; 1) I want to live a healthy life and don't want to die as a result of my lifestyle 2) I don't wear "revealing" clothing, so it's not totally obvious I'm not wearing a bra today 3) I hang out with people that are supportive of living the same way as I choose to live 4) I am trying to live my life without giving in to a concept/product that uses lies just to make a profit.

In my first couple of weeks during the de-bra-ing, I was a bit nervous. Would my job notice and tell me that I was in violation of some "dress code"? That didn't happen. Would men look at me differently, with presumptions about my sexual availability? That didn't happen. What did happen was I finally developed a "relationship" with my breasts, instead of treating them separately by putting them in this "sling". And as the study by Singer concluded, women who quit wearing bras report complete recovery from pain, swelling, cysts, and lumpiness within weeks, this was my experience. My breasts, and the muscles around them are actually stronger.

I have become increasingly aware of how everything in our culture encourages women to wear bras. There are a couple of things in particular that are disturbing. The whole notion of giving young women "training bras", what are they training for? A life of bondage and possible death? Last years rage of "Miracle Bras"...just the title is dismal. And most recently I saw a TV commercial that I grew up with...The Playtex 18 hour bra. Now that I know there is a direct link between length of bra wearing and breast cancer I find this product as harmful to women as a Virginia Slims cigarette ad.

STOP STARING AT MY CHEST.
It all started when I was in the third grade, A boy class-mate of mine started teasing me, saying he could see my boobs and I needed to wear a bra. He would not let up so being in the third grade I did what anyone would have done, I chased him. Chasing him made him tease me more but I was not going to stop and I would have kicked his ass if the principal did not catch us before I caught him. The principal asked us a few times what happened but all he got out of us was that the boy was teasing me. There was no way in hell either of us was going to say I was chasing him because he was teasing me about my boobs. When the principal threatened us with what I don't remember the boy made something up. I agreed that that was what he was teasing me about and off to class we went. I think we were both glad we did not tell him the truth. When I was in the sixth grade I loved running. We would have races at lunch, I always thought I was fast. But I gave it up because my boy friends favorite joke was telling me I was going to get two black eyes when I ran. For a long time after this I ran with my arms very close to my chest so my boobs won't bounce so much. I did not like that when I ran all the boys were looking at my boobs. Or boys making up tricks like asking you if you can touch your elbows behind your back or my boyfriend putting his arm around me and hanging his hand over my boob or boys asking for hugs so they can feel my boobs. It is sad to say but sometimes, even today, if a boy asks for a hug, even the seven year old I watch, I think they have some screaming ulterior motive.

Another time in the sixth grade two of my boy friends and I were hanging out at my house. These two boys decided it would be a good idea to attack me and see if they could take my bra off. They would chase me, catch me, grab at me, And try to unhook the back. I would get away and tell them to stop, they would for a few minutes and start again. Finally I had to lock myself in the bathroom and tell them to leave. All was forgotten because they were my friends. I just thought this was normal and accepted behavior.

In Jr. high all the boys were disappointed that I didn't wear a white t shirt the day of the water balloon fights. As I got older there was less teasing and more staring and rude comments. So in high school of course we have swimming. In this class the boys and girls were split up so I was not too worried. (This is actually a funny story)All the girls are in the locker room admiring each others suits. A girl asks to see my suit so I lift up my shirt to show her the top. There is a group of about six girls around me And this girl says oh my god you have the biggest boobs. Well I knew that. I think she did too but seeing is believing. I have a million little stories but just one more from my high school days. I went into a donut shop bought some donuts and started to leave. I hear someone say "hey". We stopped and looked, there were four boys about 15 or 16 sitting at a table. One of them looks at me and says kind of slowly, "You have the biggest boobs I've ever seen". I just stood there dumbstruck. Chris left and I just stood there looking at this kid. Nothing came out of my mouth so I just left. Here I am today not as self conscious as I used to be. If I seem a little protective when you try to get close to me don't take it personal I just have to protect myself. It just takes time to trust that someone is not just trying to cop a feel.

CHANGE?
I was asked to write some stuff about punk and punks and changes in people's lives and how we carry a lot of the internal emotional/intellectual disabilities from our society on with us even after we are punks. I think all these things can be put into a few separate categories.

Racism
Homophobia
Misogyny/Male supremacy
Classism
Hierarchy
Greed

RACISM
How you ever noticed how predominately white punk is?
Have you ever noticed any efforts to change that?
Have you ever noticed that most of the efforts to change racism in the scene are along the lines of groups of people whose purpose is to have violent confrontations with skins, racists, etc.?
Do we still think that we can just say that were not racist anymore and that racism is somebody else's fault and the 18 some years of conditioning we all underwent is now just disappeared?
Have you ever wondered what it would be to take action to build communications/connections with people outside white punk rock?
Do you really think that some white kids can come up with all the solutions for the problems of race we have to face?
Do you think white kids can even see all the problems that there are?
Have you ever been to a show or other "punk" social happening and heard people spewing the same old shit ( racist jokes, "humorous" impressions, stories about being in fear in a situation for reasons of neighborhood or the color of people in there surroundings, etc.) and have everybody go along with it?
Have you ever been to a show and noticed people were totally unaware of the privileges they have because they are white?
Have you ever heard people use the poor condition of their neighborhood as proof of their manhood/punkness without ever really thinking about the fact that some people had to grow up, live and die there?
Have you ever done any of these things yourself?

HOMOPHOBIA
Have you ever been to a show where people used words like FAGGOT, HOMO, GAY, ETC. to express that something was lacking in someone's manhood?
Or to imply that someone wasn't punk or hardcore enough?
Have you ever heard punks talking about how it was OK that somebody was gay so long as they don't force it on "me"? As though it was in someone's power or right to decide if someone else is OK?
Have you ever noticed that "heterosexuality" is forced on everybody, everywhere?
Have you ever noticed that the perspective being presented through music and spoken word is not only very white but very heterosexual also?
Have you ever found yourself engaging in these behaviors?

MISOGYNY/MALE SUPREMACY
Have you ever noticed that about 85% of the people in bands are men(while more than half the people in the world are women)?
Have you ever noticed punks classifying music made by women as not "punk" because it lacked the ingredient "tuff/hard/macho/etc." that they so desperately need?
Have you ever noticed women in the back and men in the front at shows?
Have you noticed, in your scene, that the only role available to women is that of "so and so's" girlfriend?
Have you ever noticed that people in the scene think it's normal and OK for guys in bands to use women for "anonymous" sex?
Have you ever noticed women in your scene competing over the most "desirable"(in most popular band/in position of most power) man?
Is that conducive to community?
Have you ever noticed the difference in language and content of speech when there are no women present?
Have you ever seen your scene expect women to do the majority of the shit work, and get none of the recognition or appreciation?
Have you ever heard someone in your scene use words like - betty, bitch, slut, tramp, whore, cunt, a good fuck or lay, etc. - to refer to a human being?
Have you ever heard punks in your scene engaging in "jokes" that are degrading to women?
Have you ever heard people in your scene bragging about sexual conquests with another person as though the other person was only valuable as a means of ensuring one's manhood/womanhood in the eye's of his/her peers?
Have you ever noticed the level of a persons "punkness" is permanatly linked to his/her gender identity?

CLASSISM/SHELTERISM
Have you ever noticed, in your scene, divisions based on different levels of income, standards of living, neighborhood of residence, etc.?
Have you ever noticed divisions in your scene based on whether a person lives in a box, car, shelter, apartment, squat, house, under a tree, etc.?
Have you ever heard punks say things like "oh he's a poser his parents are so rich.." ?
Have you ever noticed people in your scene divide themselves up between those who squat, those who rent, those who are homeless, those who go to college, etc.?
Have you ever noticed people in your scene being divided into groups where one values political information learned at college and another group values political information learned in the streets?

HIERARCHY
Have you ever noticed a feeling in your scene that some people are more important than the others?
Have you ever noticed a system of levels in your scene where people on different levels are given different "worths" (band members, zine writers, promoters, roadies, label owners, audience)?
Is there a "king" of your scene?
Do people in your scene use the word "scenester" to refer to certain people?
Do people in your scene tend to think that people's ideas and actions are more valid if those people have been going to shows longer than everyone else?
If those people were around at the beginning of the scene?
If those people saw black flag, minor threat, the big boys, etc.?
Are the various forms of infrastructure in your scene(club, record stores, radio shows) run by a group or by an individual?
Are their official or unofficial "leaders"?

GREED
Have you ever noticed that success is defined the same way in your scene as it is for arena rock?
Have you ever noticed bands in your scene signing to huge labels saying they needed better distribution when they don't really have anything to say anyway?
Have you noticed bands in your area charging 10$ and up for lps, cds, tapes(even though it only costs 2$ to manufacture)?
Have you noticed bands are starting to ask for four digit guarantees and are starting to complain about others not liking it when door prices exceed 5$?
Have you ever noticed how many people sell video and audio tapes of bands live shows for 10-15$ with out ever asking permission from the band or giving any of the money to the band?

ACTION VS. TALK
Have you ever noticed people in bands, audiences, zine writers, etc., who talk about all the things that need to be done, all the changes that need to be made in persons lives, so that we can embetter our world and our fellows?
Have you ever seen any of those people doing any of those thing?
Have you ever noticed people in your scene using their political beliefs as a proof of their superiority over others and not as a motivator towards action?

CONCLUSION
I used to think if I didn't use the word nigger than I wasn't racist anymore. I used to think if I didn't use the word bitch when women were around then I wasn't sexist anymore. I used to think that if I was buying into the homecoming king shit that I wasn't buying into hierarchical social relations. I used to think that so long as nobody "gay" was around it was OK to use words like faggot to dehumanize others.

I saw that there were serious problems with the way people were. Unfortunately I believed my parents, the TV, etc. when they said not engaging in those things was a simple matter of not saying a couple words, not doing a couple of behaviors anymore. They said that change would mean just those simple little things because they didn't want to REALLY change. They didn't want to really face institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, male supremacy, greed. They wanted to be able to point the finger at somebody else and not have to examine their own lives.

Do you want to change? Do want to accept the fact that people shaped your attitudes over YEARS? Do you want to accept that it might take years to extract these things from yourself? It might even take your whole life?

Are you willing to accept that you are as much a part of the problem as anybody else?
Are you willing to give up the privileges you get from our society?
Are you willing to give up the idea of human domination over nature?
Are you willing to actually accept the fact that you don't know it all and ask some one for help (oh how unmanly!)?
Or are you just looking for a mohawk, a place to be cool, a place to be superior, a place to prove your gender identity, a place to get fucked up and not take responsibility for your life?
p.s.
I've engaged in most of these behaviors over the course of my life. It's taken me a lot of work and time and willingness to change myself. To me it's not about your lame and I'm not it's about were all fucked and we need to support each other if we are going to ever get better.
Progress not Perfection.

SLAVES........ IN BERKELEY?
Over the summer I was staying at a friends house a couple blocks from 924 Gilman St. He had bought the house from a guy who's grandfather built it. His dad lived in it for fifty years. Instead of paying rent I helped my friend clear out the fifty years of shit the guy had there. One of the things I found there was a essay for school that a girl wrote sometime after 1906. It was titled "Berkeley As I Knew it in The Early Days" by Wilhelmine F. Bolsted Cianciarulo. It mainly just talks about the bottom of university ave. and the buildings, businesses that were built there. It talked about how it all used to be a swamp and about the horses and cows that used to hang out.

After I had read a few pages of it I got to the part where it says, "Thier house(the Sisterna family) was sold in 1906 and was moved to 10th street near channing way where it was remodeled. The family had one Indian slave named Pedro. He slept in the barn with the horses and was in demand at all times until he died."

I don't ever remember being told that slavery was even legal in California. I know they never said anything about slaves being here in Berkeley this century.

We seem to have a habit in our society. We rape, rob and murder, and then we demand that it either didn't happen or that were past that now and it's all behind us. We seem to lack a continuous Truth. They'll release the Nixon tapes in a while and say it's all behind us now. They'll probably admit that the FBI and the CIA killed JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, quite a few Black Panthers and hundreds of members, relatives of members and supporters of the American Indian Movement. They will undoubtedly say it was an honest mistake and the responsible parties are dead or retired so it doesn't matter any more. Irregardless of whether or not we accept the insanity; that even though they admit willfully violating every law and commandment ever thought of, repeatedly across hundreds of years, they will not let it happen again. There is still in fact a continuous truth.

The ruling class use lies, murder, assassination(foreign and domestic), bombings, slavery (35 cent and hour prison labor {if you account for inflation 35cents and hour is probably worth less than the food and shelter that the slaves received in the old days}), terrorism, sabotage, divide and conquer, starvation, war, rape and economic violence to do what ever they want to whom ever they want and experience absolutely no consequences whatsoever. This will not change in a few years because of this circumstance or that circumstnce, it will end when thier means of control( police, army, media, division, war, everyone wanting to be the next "millionaire") are either taken from them or destroyed.

TRASH #2
I had another idea about our trash dilemma. If you built various long lasting holding containers for the various things you buy at stores, you could then leave the packaging at the store. This is completely legal, think about when you buy a candy bar, you obviously leave the wrapper in thier trash. What would that accomplish? Not much, but if lots of people did it Safeway/JewelOsco/etc. would incur huge trash collection costs fairly quickly. If people were adamant about it I think the manufacturers would have to listen. The only reason they get away with the current garbage/packaging nightmare is because we all agree to pay to have the packaging taken away and "disposed of".

MURDER ON MY BLOCK.
Last month, July 1996, a black man was shot to death four buildings down the street from where I live. He was shot four times in the face. He was a major crack dealer with an estimated 200 people working under him. My partner and myself went out for an hour to buy some food. When we got home the street was blocked off on both sides and we had to convince the cops we lived there just to go down the street. I went and looked at the guy. He was lying on the sidewalk. I guess I'm too desensitized from watching Television and living in an metropolitan area, cuz I didn't feel anything about it for days. All the neighbors were all excited that something was actually happening.

A few days later my partner and myself planted a rose bush there for him. Then I started to see a chain of events that I imagine probably happened.

See, next door to us there is a woman who screams and threatens and beats her children. She must call them worthless at least 50 times a day. She also treats them like they are worthless and a burden. This seems to be a pretty recurring theme in Oakland. I hear it next door where ever I've lived in Oakland. Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to say that this behavior is a result of them being black people. I'm pretty sure if you traced it back through people's families it would originate with the white people who used to own them who would scream at them, beat them, and tell and treat them in a way so they would believe they were shit.

Anyway, I started thinking about the guy who got killed and the guy(s?) who killed him. They probably went through the same kind of childhood where life wasn't worth much. It would make it pretty easy to kill somebody else or do things that would get you jailed or killed. So I was thinking that as the guy hits his twenties, there's no work to be had. Meanwhile George Bush and Ollie North are busy importing tons of cocaine into the country. All around him in every form of media, during the 80s, greed and entrepreneurism was the order of the day. So low and behold this young black man tries his hand at selling cocaine and finds himself very good at it. Next thing you know he's dead on the side walk with not so much as a face intact. And the media call it Black on Black crime. Even though the white people started it and facilitated it every step of the way.

STATISTICS.
Here are some numbers I got from the local library. It's all from 1990-1995, so the numbers are probably higher now. The math is mine so things are kind of rounded at my convenience.

CIGARETTES
Number of cigarettes smoked a day world wide: 15,000,000,000
Number of cigarettes smoked a year world wide: 5,475,000,000,000
Number of cigarettes smoked per day in USA: 1,000,000,000
Number of cigarettes smoked per year in USA: 365,000,000,000
Profit per day on cigarettes(1$ pack)world wide: 750,000,000
Profit per year on cigarettes (1$) world wide: 274,000,000,000
$ made on cigarettes per day in USA($1/pack est.): 50,000,000
Profit on cigarettes per year in USA($1/pack est.): 18,250,000,000,
Number of people killed by smoking per year in USA: 390,000
Number of people killed by cigarettes per day in USA: 1068
Number of people killed by cigarettes per hour in USA: 44
One person is killed by smoking every 1.36 minutes in the USA
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AUTOMOBILES
$ made on car sales per year in USA: 189,000,000,000
$ made on petroleum products per year in USA: 77,000,000,000
Number of car accidents per year in USA: 15,000,000
Number of car accidents a day in USA: 41,095
Number of car accidents per hour in USA: 1712
Number of car Accidents per minute in USA: 28
One car accident in USA every other second
Number of people killed in car accidents per year in USA: 40,982
Number of people killed in car accidents per day in USA: 112
Number of people killed in car accidents per hour in USA: 5
One person killed by a car accident every 20 minutes
Number of people injured in car accidents per year in USA: 5,000,000,
Number of people injured in car accidents per day in USA: 13,698
Number of people injured in car accidents per hour in USA: 570
Number of people injured in car accidents per minute in USA: 9
One injury due to car accident every 6.66 seconds
---------------------------------------------------------------- FIREARMS
$ made on the sale of guns per year in USA: 9,881,000,000
$ made on gun sales per day in USA: 27,071,000
Number of people killed by guns per year in USA: 37,776
Number of people killed by guns per day in USA: 103
Number of people killed by guns per hour in USA: 4
One person killed in the USA by a gun every 15 minutes
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ALCOHOL
$ made from alcohol sales per year in USA: $50,000,000,000
$ made from alcohol sales in USA per day: 136,986,000
One million dollars made from alcohol sales every 10 minutes
Number of people killed by alcohol per year in USA: 19,568
Number of people killed by alcohol per day in USA: 54
Number of people killed by alcohol per hour in USA: 2
One person killed in the USA by alcohol every 30 minutes
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ILLEGAL DRUGS
Number of people killed by drugs per year in USA: 11,703
Number of people killed by drugs per day in USA: 32
One person killed by drugs in USA every 45 minutes
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BATTERY(WOMEN)
Number of women REPORTED battered per year: 3 million
Number of women battered per day: 8,219
Number of women battered per hour: 342
Number of women battered per minute: 6
One woman battered every 15 seconds
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CHILD ABUSE
Number of REPORTED cases of child abuse per year(USA): 1,700,000
Number of cases of child abuse per day(USA): 4,657
Number of cases of child abuse per hour(USA): 194
Number of cases of child abuse per minute(USA): 2.23
One case of child abuse every 18 seconds
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SEXUAL ASSAULT
Number of REPORTED sexual assaults per year(USA): 700,000
Number of sexual assaults per day(USA): 1917
Number of sexual assaults per hour(USA): 80
One sexual assault every 45 seconds
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RAPE
Number of REPORTED rapes per year(USA): 87,600
Number of rapes per day(USA): 240
Number of rapes per hour(USA): 10
One rape every six minutes.
----------------------------------------------------------------- FEMICIDE(BY PARTNER)
Number of women killed by partner per year(USA): 1,500
Number of women killed by partner per day(USA): 4
One woman killed by her partner every six hours.
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In 8 hours, the time you spent at work or school today, the following things will have happened:
1 woman killed by her partner
10 drug deaths
16 alcohol deaths
40 car accident deaths
32 gun deaths
80 women raped
352 smoking deaths
640 sexual assaults
1,552 children abused
2,736 women battered
4,560 car accident injuries
13,696 car accidents
In other words 1350 people were killed, 2160 cases of sexual violence, 26,544 assaults involving physical and/or emotional injury done to women and children, in one eight hour period. When some one in the middle east takes a couple of hostages or kills a couple of Americans we're there bombing tons of innocent civilians in the blink of an eye. The real killer is our society, and there is no way to go to war with it because it is already at war with itself.

It is war.

Here is another way of looking at it. In my life(26 years):
39,000 women killed by thier husbands
304,278 drug deaths
508,768 alcohol deaths
982,176 gun deaths
1,065,532 car accident deaths
2,277,600 women raped
10,140,000 smoking deaths
18,200,000 sexual assaults
44,200,000 cases of child abuse
78,000,000 women battered
130,000,000 car accident injuries
390,000,000 car accidents
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here are some more thoughts I had after reflecting on the statistical information I gathered:
1) The numbers on rape and sexual assault and child abuse should be multiplied by 3 or 4 to account for the majority of cases where it goes unreported.
2) Since there is one sexual assault every 45 seconds and 55% of sex assaults are done to girls under 11 that means there is one case of a kid getting incested or molested every minute and a half. I figure that an average case of a kid getting molested lasts more than a minute and a half, therefore a child is being sexually molested constantly in the USA.
3) Our way of life almost kills as many people per year as either world war did.
4) We don't value ourselves or each other or life very highly.
5) If you divide the number of deaths per day by the amount of money made per day you get a figure of how much money they made per person killed, for that year, they are as follows:
Cigarettes - $46,816.48 per person killed
Autos+gas - $4,623,287.67 per person killed
Guns - $262,825.24 per person killed
Alcohol - $2,536,777.78 per person killed
6) A few states are starting to talk about suing the ciggarette companies for the amount of people who must be treated for smoking related disease with no insurance or state paid for insurance. They should also be suing the gas and car companies because there are far more car accident injuries per day than there are smoking related hospitalizations.
7) The government and media use numbers a lot to justify thier interests. I used to think that they just made up numbers, but they don't have to. When you say 32 people died of drug deaths today it sounds like a lot, but it doesn't sound like much compared to the 1062 people who will die because of cigarettes today(which are totally supported by government subsidies). So I think what it comes down to is that they are telling parts of the truth and most people don't care enough to find out the rest for themselves.

However, I hear a lot of activists and punks talk about how "so many more people die of cigarettes and alcohol than drugs" and use it as a means of discounting the damage illegal drugs actually do or arguing for there legalization. They have killed 300,000 people in the USA in my life and they have killed seven of my friends in the last three years. Also it seems like the government/media aren't actually opposed to preventable death, they are only opposed to the ones that could be turned on them(guns) and the ones that provide them with the opportunity to invade minority communities(drugs).If they cared about peoples health, they would be attacking cigarettes, which kill 33.3 more people than drugs do(which also translates to huge unpaid medical bills from uninsured smokers that the states have to foot the bill for). Also alcohol kills twice the number of people drugs do.

If they really cared about preventing violent death then they would go after cars(can you think of anything more violent than being propelled into cement or steel at 60-100 miles an hour?) not guns. Cars have killed more people than guns for decades until last year when they killed virtually the same amount of people. Furthermore if they were out to end violent why would they do things like war, atom bombs, etc.

I also noticed that the media is pretty screwy about it's logic. They always talk about how most of the car death happen in this situation or that location or whatever. The reality is that all car deaths occur in cars, all car accident injuries invole cars. Also the media seems to like to put on all those cheesy partnership for a drug free America commercials which happen to be funded by the cigarette/alcohol companies, the biggest producers of chemical warfare on the people. But it kind of figures they would put out commercials that badmouth thier COMPETITION. So in conclusion I can only make one recommendation - run for it.

CREDITS
Bras and Breast Cancer was written by Cynthia
Stop Staring at my Chest by Kelli from Weekender (it was taken from weekender w/out permission actually)
There giving vouchers..... by Julia Vinograd
Change was written by me for Ed's zine, I don't know what it is called
I got a lot of info out of the nice woman at the Berkeley Public Library reference phone line
The rest was done by me.
THANKS.