Starvation, poverty and disease are market driven.

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

What a tragedy. A beautiful little boy who should be experiencing all the pleasures that a healthy and well fed young life can offer. I can barely look at it without wanting to take him in my arms and caress the little man; hold him like I have my own little ones, or the way we hold our pets.  A mother or father whose kisses and hugs bring such joy to the recipient and the giver is waiting for that moment when starvation and lack of water, ensures he breathes his last breath. It's not a nice death is it?  Look at the body and the physical pain it brings to the child and the emotional pain to the adult, herself, not far from death's door. 

The scene in the picture is indeed horrific. It is heart wrenching, sad, makes us angry and makes us want to cry at the same time.  But let's get something clear in our heads. What we see in the picture, a starving boy being given water by his equally deprived mother, or female guardian, is not something that occurs because of a lack of resources or money.  The condition prevails not because people in that particular part of the world are lazy or stupid or can't govern themselves.  It is not as some might argue, god's wrath, or the devil's work or the work of any supernatural beings or ghostly demons. It is not because of overpopulation or that there's too many people on the planet.

This young boy will die of starvation amid plenty.   He will die of diseases that were cured long ago.  The cause of these events is political and economic.  Society has infrastructure and that infrastructure is put in place by directing capital and labor power to do so.  The trillion or two the US has spent in Iraq would solve world hunger, would eliminate what we see here forever.

The infant mortality, disease and starvation that engulf millions of people in this world is a product of the market, of capitalism.  The communities in which these people live have little public infrastructure, no water system, no sewage system and instead unsafe water and sewage flows openly in the streets if at all. There is no medical and health care system in place. Diet is poor and shelter is inadequate. The money is there to remedy this.  But the owners of capital, capitalists as the Wall Street Journal calls them as opposed to many anti-capitalists who choose words like corpocracy, plutocracy, meritocracy, oligarchy and other terms to avoid calling them what they are, will not allocate capital to buy labor power and the necessary materials necessary to end this savagery.

According to Global Issues:
10.6 million children died in 2003 before they reached the age of 5 (same as children population in France, Germany, Greece and Italy

1.4 million die each year from lack of access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation

The money is there to change this:
A conservative estimate for 2010 finds that at least a third of all private financial wealth, and nearly half of all offshore wealth, is now owned by world’s richest 91,000 people – just 0.001% of the world’s population.

The world’s billionaires — just 497 people (approximately 0.000008% of the world’s population) — were worth $3.5 trillion (over 7% of world GDP).

The world spent close to $2 trillion on military hardware in 2012 with the bulk of that coming from the US, the worlds largest arms dealer by far. Corporations are hoarding trillions, private capitalists have stashed away some $26 trillion or more in offshore tax havens. Poverty and most disease can be eliminated, but capitalism cannot do it; it is the cause of it.

The US president Obama, Hilary Clinton and all the other representatives of wall Street and the system that perpetuates the misery we see in the graphic, are prepared to bomb Syria because of the deaths of less than 2000 people.  But the policies that these people institute and defend to the teeth kill millions of children and adults yearly; their deaths are not accidents, they are the product of conscious decisions by human beings.

These conditions and the endless wars that we currently see begun by primarily by the US government  cannot be eradicated under the present economic system we know as capitalism.  It is not simply that they cannot be eradicated in what is often called the developing world, they are on the increase in the advanced capitalist countries also. As an earlier blog pointed out, the cost of making the world safe for US corporations is not only causing untold environmental damage and misery for the world's populations, it is also driving US workers further in to poverty and debt.  Even the US troops are facing cuts to necessary services.  This will hasten the crisis in the US military much like the crisis that occurred during the imperialist war against Vietnam.

It is pointless feeling guilty about having a better life than the woman and her child in the picture.  We are not individually responsible for it and guilt is a pointless emotion that accomplishes little.  We can collectively end it though.   I was talking to a group of young men the other night, they were all well educated and relatively financially secure. They had good jobs but when it came to understanding the forces at play in society and what was going on in the world around them, especially US capitalism's role in it, they were clueless and actually accepted that they were oblivious to much of what is going on.  This is nothing to be proud of even though, the forces against us in the US are considerable as we are faced day in day out with an ideological  offensive from the 1% about the merits of their system and how there's opportunity for all if we take the bull by the horns.

Throughout the world,  workers are fighting back against the capitalist offensive.  Working class women that fill the factories of Bangladesh have waged street battles against factory owners and their hired thugs.  Chinese workers have struck foreign multinationals for higher wages and better conditions and won raises of as much as $20% and this is without independent unions.
Indigenous people throughout Latin America, India, Indonesia and the entire world are leading the struggle against the environmental devastation caused by the energy giants and mining companies.

Greek workers, Portuguese workers, women and gays in Russia, are all refusing to be cowed by the worshipers of the market. And we saw the rise of the Occupy Movement in the US that challenged the repressive laws of the 1% and battled the new beefed up security apparatus built in anticipation of the resistance that will occur to the increased offensive of capital.

And here in the US, we should not underestimate the developments that have occurred around Obama's eagerness to bomb Syria.  The outpouring of opposition has been intense and this has caused the 1%'s representatives in Congress to push back against Obama's war drive.  In a twist of irony, it looks like old Putin might have thrown Obama a lifeline brokering a deal with Syria's Assad to have the UN take charge of that country's chemical weapons stash.

This development is very positive and when we consider the ongoing global resistance to the capitalist offensive we should be inspired and optimistic about it.  But we must take the bull by the horns, we must accept firstly in our own consciousness that the present state of affairs will eventually lead to the end of life as we know it, market driven wars and environmental catastrophe all in the pursuit of profits will ensure it. We must recognize that the most destabilizing force in society today and the reason for much of world poverty is US capitalism.  American's cannot find a solution to our problems within the borders of our own nation state.  The solution to the starvation we see in the graphic, the endless wars and driving back our own 1%'s austerity agenda lies in the building of a global movement.  Capitalism is global and the fight against it's destructive effects must be global.

Replacing an economic system of production where a tiny minority of individuals own the means by which we produce the necessities of life and who set these forces in motion only for personal gain, is our goal.  Capitalism is an anarchistic unplanned system of production, it cannot advance humanity.  It is, as we say here, past its expiration date.  Only a democratic socialist economy and political system can solve the crises that capitalism creates.

A couple of things to remember:
The Soviet union was not a socialist or communist society.
Socialism is not a utopian idea it's just a different way of constructing human society
Sweden, Finland or a national health service is not socialism or communism
Obama is not a socialist (for my American brothers and sisters only)
Capitalism overthrew feudalism and socialized production
Socialism will take it one step further and socialize ownership of the process of production, distribution and exchange. It brings economic democracy.

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Mothering: Having a baby is not the same everywhere

We hear all the time how this the US is greatest country in the world and all that.  Of course, every ruling class says this in its efforts to create national pride and convince the masses that nowhere can equal the treatment their particular government affords.  Most American's mind you are well aware that here in the US if you have no money "you're on your own baby".  We're told waster like George W Bush or the hedge fund managers, bankers and other coupon clippers all pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps which of course is nonsense. The social services in the US, a 24 hour consumer society are extremely poor as the individual is supposed to fend for themselves. that's how it works.  But we are in the greatest society on earth.  The unelected rulers of the US wouldn't care at all if the US working class never traveled anywhere.  They'd prefer we know nothing other than what we see on their TV.  We thought our readers might find this piece of interest about how another society, Finland, deals with the question of pregnancy and childbirth. It is from the website, Mothering.

The Finnish Baby Box

By: Melanie Mayo, Mothering Blogger, and Cynthia Mosher

Posted 3/1/11 • Last updated 6/6/13 • 35966 views • 33 comments

by Christine Gross-Loh, author of the new book Parenting Without Borders: Surprising Lessons Parents Around the World Can Teach Us

      

I’ve long been fascinated by motherhood around the world. What is it like to birth in another country? What’s the lore on starting solids in another culture? How do children play in other countries? How do they sleep and who sleeps with them? How do cultural or societal supports ease the transition to new parenthood?

My friend Michele, an American new mother living in Finland, joins me here today to help satisfy my curiosity about motherhood abroad, in her guest post below.

The Finnish Baby Box

by Michele Simeon

In Finland, spotting babies with the same birth year isn’t just a matter of judging size. A famed national health care benefit of my adopted homeland is the maternity package, known as the ‘baby box’ in our household. Expecting mothers receive a large, cardboard box, itself designed to act as the baby’s first bed, full of gender neutral infant clothing and other essentials. Those who would prefer to purchase their own supplies instead receive a grant, and mothers carrying more than one child receive increased benefits on a graduated scale, so that e.g. families with twins can receive any combination of three grants or boxes.

The baby box is unique in the world and has been available in Finland to low-income mothers since 1937 and to all mothers since 1949. Each year, the designs and colors vary, creating allegiances of palettes and nostalgia for those special colors of infancy. You can view an inventory of the 2010 box here.

I pounced on my daughter Hilla’s baby box like it was the biggest, best Christmas present I’d ever received–that is, after hauling it uphill during a heat wave, eight months of pregnant belly weighing me down, much to the dismay of passersby. ‘It’s big and heavy,’ the kind postal worker had warned me. ‘That’s OK’ I beamed enthusiastically before realizing that my protruding middle prevented a conventional front carry.

But it was worth it. Hilla begins each day by kicking off her baby box bedding and exclaiming “boof!” At seven months, she’s outgrown the pajamas, still wears much of the box’s other clothing, and has yet to grow into a good deal more. There’s no sign of teeth in her gummy smile, so the toothbrush has gone unused. The teething ring and rhyme book, however, are part of an important morning ritual of toy and book mayhem. If we take the stroller out, Hilla will get bundled into the baby box snowsuit and sleeping bag–cleverly sized items that might just last until next winter if we’re lucky. Then there are the breast pads for mother, the bib for a messy little mouth experimenting with solids, and the towel that dries chubby baby bodies after the narrative of the day’s events has been washed away.  Hilla is tucked into her duvet until morning, when baby legs decide it’s time to start a new day.

While the box alone cannot create material equality for all babies born in this country, it is only one of many benefits designed to give children a good, fair start to life. There’s no shame in using public aid that everyone accesses and there’s no statement of consumerist individuality in the clothing that all babies are wearing. The box gives us lots of fun opportunities to play baby punch buggy and it spared us more than a few shopping trips and plenty of money, but its real value lies in its message of social justice for all children.

What public benefits are available to families in your communities? Which would you like to see?

Image credit top: Finnish Baby Box by Roxeteer

Image bottom: Two-month-old Hilla naps in her baby box outerwear. The bear & bee duvet plus cover were also a part of the package.

Michele Simeon is an American writer and editor living in Helsinki. Visit her blog A House Called Nut where she writes about living abroad in Finland and her experience of multicultural, bilingual family life.

Christine is a mother of four, crafter, journalist, and author. She wrote The Diaper-Free Baby (HarperCollins, 2007), a book about elimination communication, and a book and craft kit, Origami Suncatchers (Sterling, 2011). She’s now writing a book about global parenting practices to be published by Avery, a Penguin Books imprint, in 2013. Visit her at her blog.

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Israeli soldiers disciplined for dancing Gangnam Style with Palestinians

The Zionist regime is facing its most serious assault in decades. Israeli soldiers on patrol in the West Bank came upon a dance hall where Palestinians were having a shindig. The usual bullying and brutality directed at Palestinians didn’t occur; something far more dangerous did. It appears the soldiers joined Palestinian men who were dancing to the now famous “Gangnam Style”. Israeli army spokespersons consider the incident very “serious” as "the soldiers exposed themselves to unnecessary danger and were disciplined accordingly," AP reported. It reminded me of the fraternizing between the troops during the first world war. The officers were punished for it. Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) is a good film about that incident and the interview with the director is good on the DVD of it. It’s not the soldiers’ putting themselves in unnecessary danger that is the problem, as the military brass claims. Fraternizing with “the enemy” tends to undermine the argument that they are the “enemy”. Here’s the party from Israeli TV

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Egypt. Worldwide. Yeats. Joyce. Homesick.

by Sean O'Torrain

In my home country (Ireland) the old way is to make out you know as little as possible. Like African Americans came to learn showing your were too smart could get you killed by the ruling elite. So like many others of my background I will say "You know you might be right there, by God your are not so slow, I will have to think about that now." As I said, the rule tended to be whatever you say say nothing.

I am only rambling on here. Well maybe not. I am a wee bit homesick today, missing the grey mist of rain, the grey rocks sticking up through green grass, the grey Atlantic crashing on to the western shores. While here I am in in Chicago, a flat ugly city where if you go over a bump on the road it threatens to give you an erotic experience.

So anyway where was I?  I had a wee read of Yeats there to keep me going, I know he was influenced by fascism towards the end but he was a poet of great genius. He also had a bit of humor. He wrote:"Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through periods of joy." I am laughing here.

He also wrote: "Things fall apart the center cannot hold." This brings me to today. I am getting old and this is a factor. I have some health problems and this is another factor. But this not the full story. The full story is that I just cannot keep up with all the gigantic uprisings and wars and civil wars climate destruction, the rising of the women, the movements against sexism and racism,  and new issues with which we are being confronted. Never has there been a time like this. Yes it for sure is right. For capitalism things fall apart the center cannot hold.

But for the working class thing are not so good either. The center is not holding together too good there either. The big issue is this. What force will arise or will a force arise that can overthrow capitalism and take society forward to its new phase  of international democratic socialism before all is destroyed by climate change, mass starvation and nuclear war. The union and labor leaders control the organizations of the working class and should do this job. They should be providing the aggressive offensive center. But they will not. Cowardly, intellectually duller than ducks, with their badly designed suits huddling beside the Obamas and the rest of them, they are terrified. Only if a movement is built below them that threatens all their privileges and positions will they do anything.

So new forces will have to be built. We see the youth and workers and women in Egypt forcing the overthrow of Mubarak, then making the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood untenable, and now taking on the military. It is heroic, beyond heroic. We see them taking on the US armed military with only rocks and their bare hands. I cannot see the steps forward that are necessary internationally being taken without such steps.

I do not think that what Marx said that capitalism could be changed peacefully is any longer accurate. Look at the richest of the major capitalist countries the US. Before the working class are even rising the capitalist class have armed its state to the teeth, are spying on just about everybody. They are ready to put the workers movement down in blood in every country. Is the Egyptian  military's decision to put down the Muslim Brotherhood come hell or high water not the music of the future?

Unless.

Unless, that is, fighting forces are built in the working class. Not just amongst the courageous youth.  But also amongst the big battalions, the working class, in the factories, the transport industries, the energy sectors, the huge retail chains and so on. And fighting forces that take on the divisions, the sexism, the racism,  and are prepared to fight and literally fight, that is not just by giving out flyers. This will be important of course in the struggle for the consciousness of the working class but serious combative measures will be necessary.

I remember being at a meeting of auto workers in Detroit some years ago. I think it was around the Delphi struggle. There were about a dozen workers around the table talking tactics. I made the point that the bosses would win unless the factories were taken over and physically defended, other forces mobilized on the outside to fight and an all out battle such as the 1930's waged, such as the youth of the black revolt waged. I remember so clearly how the eyes of the workers turned away. They were not ready to hear that. The Delphi bosses won. The working class will have to stop turning away, will  have to face this reality, will have to be ready to hear this, or face defeat.

And what about the left and the radical forces here and internationally. I agree with putting forward a program for a new society and also using the transitional method. but I do not agree with leaving the issue of strategy and tactics aside. We have to tell the truth. The bosses will massacre the workers in their millions if they are allowed to in their effort to keep the power. I believe the bosses would be prepared to drop tactical nuclear weapons on their own cities to keep the power. Not only do we have to prepare to fight but we also have to tell workers they have to organize to fight and this also means winning over sections of the state apparatus. The gains of the thirties were won by fighting, the gains of the 60's also. They are all being taken away.

And back again to wee Yeats and also Joyce. Yeats said "Do not wait to strike when the iron is hot but make it hot by striking." He said "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." He wrote :"Think like a wise man (woman) but communicate in the language of the people."  Wee Yeats  was not so slow.

Then there is the man himself wee Joyce. But before quoting him. The revolutionary left and this includes all of us, including myself, have achieved the most pathetic of results in this period of worldwide upheaval with the center not holding. I believe this has been because of a combination of left sectarianism, ultra leftism and opportunism. I may be wrong on this. But there is some reason more than the objective situation for our pathetic failure. We have to stop this what we used to call at home :"whistling past the graveyard." That is pretending that all is well when anybody with an eye in their head can see it is not. And when the proof is there for all to see. There are no mass forces moving to the revolutionary left.

So to Joyce. He wrote: "A man's (woman's) errors are his portals of discovery." What do I mean by putting this here. I mean that the revolutionary left have made mistake after mistake in the past decades. Myself included. We have to face up to this. And dialectically turn these mistakes into their opposite that is "portals" which if we enter can allow us to correct our ways. This means openly recognizing and articulating publicly our mistakes. I do this regularly. What makes me worry more than anything else is that most of the small forces which claim the mantle of revolutionary socialism continue to go on as if they have never made any mistake, as if they are still correct on everything. This is a recipe for disaster. We have to as wee Joyce said see that our errors are made into portals for discovery. This means openly and publicly articulating our errors and discussing these in the working class movement in as Yeats says the language "of the people.

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Politics is life.

Tarqua Bay, Lagos Nigeria

by Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired

I have been accused of many things as we all have. Some are constructive, some not.  Some are honest appraisals, some dishonest attempts to simply obscure an argument and introduce the personal. The worst, possibly most harmful and quite hurtful criticism I face is when people, not most people but some people, not necessarily cruel people and often quite well meaning people accuse me of being too long winded, too wordy. The gall!

I find great pleasure in writing about things, a sort of catharsis really. I have only begun to write extensively in the past 10 years or so as I never considered myself a writer and, surely, one has to be an “accredited”, writer to write,  and a university recognized economist to write or even comment on economics..

This is not so as people have written their thoughts about the world around them long before universities and other institutions of the ruling classes emerged. The cave paintings in France and the ancient scrolls are examples of it.  People made clothes long before society recognized the profession we know as Tailors.

Anyway, getting too wordy here.  I am one of those people who will talk to anyone anywhere, my close friends can attest to that. After I got back from Baghdad in 1971 my mates asked me how it went, me not speaking Arabic and all.  No worries; humans get by real easy in these situations if you enter their community in friendship and want to learn from them, socialize with them; I bought Arab clothes, it was no problem. The Iraqi’s were kind and generous to me, despite the dirty role British capitalism played in their history. All people differentiate between those that rule and those ruled. I am sickened by what the war criminals Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and others including their British colleague Blair have done to the Iraqi people.

Last week a couple at the pub told me that they “hate politics”.

“But politics is life.” I told them. It can be frustrating and stressful at times but it is also inspiring, “What you hate is bourgeois politics which is what we have here, the politics of the 1%.”  Who votes Democratic and who votes Republican.

Politics determines whether we eat or not. Where our children go to school, where we live, whether we can get medical attention etc. As Marx once said, “Nothing human is alien to me.”

When I’m in airports or any place where as a consumer I get to talk to someone working, I always bring this relationship of work in to the conversation, or at least open the door as the worker won’t shut up when you start on that subject. In my years active in the labor movement I would hear repeatedly from full time staff and high-level officials (the experts on worker attitudes) how workers move in “baby steps” and how we have to “educate”them etc. This was always their excuse for not fighting for concrete needs, for not raising demands that raise expectations because the leadership didn’t believe them realizable.

Mention to one of those workers at the stands in airports that sell anything from papers to candy that you support unions and that they need a union.  My conversation has many times gone like this:

“You’d think the damn bosses would get you a stool to sit on when you need to rest your legs, you need a union.”

I’ve never heard a negative response to this.  I’ve heard, “Can you get me a union?” and, “get me a stool and I’ll join your union.”

Now I’m not saying workers don’t need to be exposed to new or more complex ideas, I have many people to thank for exposing me to new ideas.  But if we consider that the heads of organized labor, and the left, have failed miserably when it comes to increasing our numbers, and while this is partially due to laws that make it difficult, in the main it’s also because of their approach.  We have been in much worse conditions that these. The example of the stool is clear, fight for the basic things that improve our lives, wages, work conditions health care housing etc. and workers will be drawn to that. If we can help put more food on the table, the recipient will be more open to our ideas about society and the world around us.

Malcom X was in the UAW for I while if my memory serves me right.  Had the Union officials fought racism aggressively he would have been attracted to that.  As it was, it was the Black Muslim movement that gave him a theoretical grounding, an explanation for the racism and horror he experienced in his life.

We are encouraged not talk to each other at all except about mundane things like sports. Who came up with the idea that we should never talk about politics or religion?  The intellectuals of the bourgeois talk about these issues. What they don’t want is workers talking about it from our perspective. Prior to the English Revolution, King Charles was adamant about keeping the sports on Sundays (jousting etc.) if not, the people would be gathering among themselves and talking about all sorts of pernicious ideas. Is the king really god’s man on earth?  Do we have to pay tithes? Why must there be an intermediary between god and me?  Why must we work to feed the feudal lords?  Oh yes, and how come the king gets to sleep with my new bride before I do? Or me before my husband does?

I think one of the reasons some workers (blue collar workers like me in particular) are reluctant to write or engage in conversation about more complex things is that we lack the confidence, a missed comma here, incorrect grammar there.  And our society teaches in so many ways that if you see a weakness in someone, exploit it, it’s the way to win and “winning is everything.”

At Costco yesterday I walked to one of the stands as I always do for a free food treat.  The woman was maybe in her 60’s and naturally, there was no stool for her to sit on and she could have easily accomplished her task sitting. It would be nice if she at least had the option. I asked her about the product and she replied in an African dialect. My hearing’s not what it was but I could tell it was an African dialect plus she looked like she was from the west.

“What part of Africa are you from?” I asked her. I’m always a little cautious about this, especially being a white male as it can make someone like this a little nervous, not sure of my intentions.

“West Africa” she replied without looking at me directly.

“Nigeria” I responded

Her demeanor changed somewhat and she responded in the affirmative.

“I used to live in Yaba” I told her.

She was really excited now and told me she was from Lagos.  I mentioned Tarqua Bay where my parents used to take me swimming and another place called Vicky Beach. We used to go by canoe to one place sometimes and I remember the guy telling me not to put my hands in the water, “Cuda Cuda” he said meaning there were Barracuda in there.

We talked a little more and she asked what I was doing there and I told her that my dad was in the British Army, he was stationed there.  He rented from this Nigerian and they were the best of friends for 50 years until Sam’s death.  Sam Fawehinmi was from Ondo State, a Yoruba and she knew of the family. Sam had a furniture factory. She laughed as I told her I used to play with Sam’s daughter Tunde when we were small. Sam became a wealthy man and I know him and my dad had some dealings because my dad was a quartermaster in the army and a bit of a, creative character when it came to making a buck.  But him and Sam remained close friends till they died. Sam would always stay with my folks in London although he had the money to say in more fancy accommodation. He was an imposing figure with a Fez. I never really got to know him although I know my dad told me to keep my politics to myself  if I was visiting at the same time as Sam.

I reminded the woman of the Ju Ju man and how my mum used to give me money to give to him. I was only 8 and the Ju Ju man was something else, I was quite astonished and afraid at the same time.  The lovely man who looked after me when my folks were out and used to take me out in to what in my child’s mind was the jungle but probably local forest, would point to little trinkets, small pouches and bones hanging form tree branches.  “Ju Ju” he warned me and I must not touch them. Ju Ju still has influence as I found out fairly recently when I jokingly told a Kenyan friend I was sick of western religions and was starting a Ju Ju branch here in San Leandro. She wouldn’t sit next to me at the bar last time I saw her.

This man died in the Biafran war, a horrible conflict that many Nigerians died from. The Biafran War was a colonial world conflict the flames of which were fanned by the major powers in the struggle for natural resources and Nigeria has oil; the Stalinists on one side, the western imperialist countries on the other.

My exchange with this Nigerian woman was fairly brief but it made my visit to Costco worthwhile.  I told her Odabo as I left and she responded likewise. We both parted with broad smiles on our faces, it made my day more pleasant and I think it did hers too.

See politics is good stuff.

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A moment with some relatives

In a change of pace we share here a look at some of our relatives.  Beautiful relatives that have been trapped in cages all their lives and experimented on by our doctors.  A great film about the tragedy of how we treat these relatives is Project Nimh.  Look at the faces of these animals. I have seen images like this before with other animals that have never stepped on natural grass but spent their lives in cages. We are all animals on this earth. Enjoy it.

From The Dish: There’s a moment here – about a minute in – when you see chimps who have lived almost all their lives in research cages finally see the world God made them for – either again or for the first time. Some are as old as 50. The look on their faces is simply one of awe. Andri Antoniades sets the scene: The United States remains one of the only two nations in the world that still uses chimpanzees for biomedical research purposes. Kept in laboratory cages, these animals are never given the chance to see the outside world, let alone touch it with their own hands. But that is (slowly) changing. Recently a small group of federally owned laboratory chimpanzees were retired to the Chimp Haven sanctuary in Keithville, LA. The Humane Society posted this clip of some of those animals and their first foray into a natural habitat. For the elderly chimps that were originally caught in the wild, it had been decades since they experienced life outside of a cage. And for the younger chimps that had been bred in captivity, this was their first time ever stepping onto soil or feeling the embrace of others in their group unobstructed by cage bars.

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