rivervision

from joy in palestine is this video from nicholas kristoff about the situation in the south hebron hills for the palestinians and bedouins.
joy comments:

But Kristof sure missed the mark at the very end of his piece. He says that settler attack Palestinians because they’re scared. He says that a number of settlers have been killed by Palestinians living in the area. Well, as far as I know, that number is two. Two. Let’s be honest, while settlers certainly use fear to marshal their supporters, they attack Palestinians because they want to drive them off of the land. That’s what their own statements indicate.

Nonetheless, I was glad to take look at what Kristof says and how he says it. There are a couple of arguments he makes that I think are worth using.

go watch the video, especially if you are an american or a brit. learn the truth of occupation. and while you are imagining it, imagine that’s you and your family instead of strangers living in those tents.

and from the livesay’s who are counting the days until they get back home to haiti, this video about the tent cities that people are living in 6 months after the earthquake.

and again, go watch the video, imagine that being you and your loved ones in those tents, again, especially if you are an american.

maybe one of these videos will cause you to take action in the caribbean or occupied palestine, or your local animal shelter or food pantry. maybe one of these videos will get you to start reading more about your country’s part in the humanitarian disaster in both countries, or another country. maybe watching one of these videos will help you to count your blessings and to hold one that you love closer, or reach out to one that you love who needs it. i don’t care what watching one of these videos causes you to do, i just hope they cause you to do something besides just getting through your day as you usually do. if you are someone like me who is already doing something [i'm not doing a lot these days, but i do continue to educate myself, it's not a lot, but it's something]? i hope that these videos just encourage you to keep doing what you are doing.

(from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Howard_Zinn.jpg)

Howard Zinn
1922-2010

Against Discouragement
Spelman College Commencement Address, May 2005
By Howard Zinn
[In 1963, historian Howard Zinn was fired from Spelman College in Atlanta GA, where he was chair of the History Department, because of his civil rights activities. This year, he was invited back to give the commencement address. Here is the text of that speech, given on May 15, 2005.]

I am deeply honored to be invited back to Spelman after forty-two years. I would like to thank the faculty and trustees who voted to invite me, and especially your president, Dr. Beverly Tatum. And it is a special privilege to be here with Diahann Carroll and Virginia Davis Floyd.

But this is your day — the students graduating today. It’s a happy day for you and your families. I know you have your own hopes for the future, so it may be a little presumptuous for me to tell you what hopes I have for you, but they are exactly the same ones that I have for my grandchildren.

My first hope is that you will not be too discouraged by the way the world looks at this moment. It is easy to be discouraged, because our nation is at war — still another war, war after war — and our government seems determined to expand its empire even if it costs the lives of tens of thousands of human beings. There is poverty in this country, and homelessness, and people without health care, and crowded classrooms, but our government, which has trillions of dollars to spend, is spending its wealth on war. There are a billion people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East who need clean water and medicine to deal with malaria and tuberculosis and AIDS, but our government, which has thousands of nuclear weapons, is experimenting with even more deadly nuclear weapons. Yes, it is easy to be discouraged by all that.

But let me tell you why, in spite of what I have just described, you must not be discouraged.

I want to remind you that, fifty years ago, racial segregation here in the South was entrenched as tightly as was apartheid in South Africa. The national government, even with liberal presidents like Kennedy and Johnson in office, was looking the other way while Black people were beaten and killed and denied the opportunity to vote. So Black people in the South decided they had to do something by themselves. They boycotted and sat in and picketed and demonstrated, and were beaten and jailed, and some were killed, but their cries for freedom were soon heard all over the nation and around the world, and the President and Congress finally did what they had previously failed to do — enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Many people had said: The South will never change. But it did change. It changed because ordinary people organized and took risks and challenged the system and would not give up. That’s when democracy came alive.

I want to remind you also that when the war in Vietnam was going on, and young Americans were dying and coming home paralyzed, and our government was bombing the villages of Vietnam — bombing schools and hospitals and killing ordinary people in huge numbers — it looked hopeless to try to stop the war. But just as in the Southern movement, people began to protest and soon it caught on. It was a national movement. Soldiers were coming back and denouncing the war, and young people were refusing to join the military, and the war had to end.

The lesson of that history is that you must not despair, that if you are right, and you persist, things will change. The government may try to deceive the people, and the newspapers and television may do the same, but the truth has a way of coming out. The truth has a power greater than a hundred lies. I know you have practical things to do — to get jobs and get married and have children. You may become prosperous and be considered a success in the way our society defines success, by wealth and standing and prestige. But that is not enough for a good life.

Remember Tolstoy’s story, “The Death of Ivan Illych.” A man on his deathbed reflects on his life, how he has done everything right, obeyed the rules, become a judge, married, had children, and is looked upon as a success. Yet, in his last hours, he wonders why he feels a failure. After becoming a famous novelist, Tolstoy himself had decided that this was not enough, that he must speak out against the treatment of the Russian peasants, that he must write against war and militarism.

My hope is that whatever you do to make a good life for yourself — whether you become a teacher, or social worker, or business person, or lawyer, or poet, or scientist — you will devote part of your life to making this a better world for your children, for all children. My hope is that your generation will demand an end to war, that your generation will do something that has not yet been done in history and wipe out the national boundaries that separate us from other human beings on this earth.

Recently I saw a photo on the front page of the New York Times which I cannot get out of my mind. It showed ordinary Americans sitting on chairs on the southern border of Arizona, facing Mexico. They were holding guns and they were looking for Mexicans who might be trying to cross the border into the United States. This was horrifying to me — the realization that, in this twenty-first century of what we call “civilization,” we have carved up what we claim is one world into two hundred artificially created entities we call “nations” and are ready to kill anyone who crosses a boundary.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary, so fierce it leads to murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred? These ways of thinking, cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on, have been useful to those in power, deadly for those out of power.

Here in the United States, we are brought up to believe that our nation is different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral; that we expand into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy. But if you know some history you know that’s not true. If you know some history, you know we massacred Indians on this continent, invaded Mexico, sent armies into Cuba, and the Philippines. We killed huge numbers of people, and we did not bring them democracy or liberty. We did not go into Vietnam to bring democracy; we did not invade Panama to stop the drug trade; we did not invade Afghanistan and Iraq to stop terrorism. Our aims were the aims of all the other empires of world history — more profit for corporations, more power for politicians.

The poets and artists among us seem to have a clearer understanding of the disease of nationalism. Perhaps the Black poets especially are less enthralled with the virtues of American “liberty” and “democracy,” their people having enjoyed so little of it. The great African-American poet Langston Hughes addressed his country as follows:

You really haven’t been a virgin for so long.
It’s ludicrous to keep up the pretext.You’ve slept with all the big powers
In military uniforms,
And you’ve taken the sweet life
Of all the little brown fellows.

Being one of the world’s big vampires,
Why don’t you come on out and say so
Like Japan, and England, and France,
And all the other nymphomaniacs of power.

I am a veteran of the Second World War. That was considered a “good war,” but I have come to the conclusion that war solves no fundamental problems and only leads to more wars. War poisons the minds of soldiers, leads them to kill and torture, and poisons the soul of the nation.

My hope is that your generation will demand that your children be brought up in a world without war. It we want a world in which the people of all countries are brothers and sisters, if the children all over the world are considered as our children, then war — in which children are always the greatest casualties — cannot be accepted as a way of solving problems.

I was on the faculty of Spelman College for seven years, from 1956 to 1963. It was a heartwarming time, because the friends we made in those years have remained our friends all these years. My wife Roslyn and I and our two children lived on campus. Sometimes when we went into town, white people would ask: How is it to be living in the Black community? It was hard to explain. But we knew this — that in downtown Atlanta, we felt as if we were in alien territory, and when we came back to the Spelman campus, we felt that we were at home.

Those years at Spelman were the most exciting of my life, the most educational certainly. I learned more from my students than they learned from me. Those were the years of the great movement in the South against racial segregation, and I became involved in that in Atlanta, in Albany, Georgia, in Selma, Alabama, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Greenwood and Itta Bena and Jackson.

I learned something about democracy: that it does not come from the government, from on high, it comes from people getting together and struggling for justice. I learned about race. I learned something that any intelligent person realizes at a certain point — that race is a manufactured thing, an artificial thing, and while race does matter (as Cornel West has written), it only matters because certain people want it to matter, just as nationalism is something artificial. I learned that what really matters is that all of us — of whatever so-called race and so-called nationality — are human beings and should cherish one another.

I was lucky to be at Spelman at a time when I could watch a marvelous transformation in my students, who were so polite, so quiet, and then suddenly they were leaving the campus and going into town, and sitting in, and being arrested, and then coming out of jail full of fire and rebellion. You can read all about that in Harry Lefever’s book Undaunted By The Fight: Spelman College and the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1967.

One day Marian Wright (now Marian Wright Edelman), who was my student at Spelman, and was one of the first arrested in the Atlanta sit-ins, came to our house on campus to show us a petition she was about to put on the bulletin board of her dormitory. The heading on the petition epitomized the transformation taking place at Spelman College. Marian had written on top of the petition: “Young Ladies Who Can Picket, Please Sign Below.”

My hope is that you will not be content just to be successful in the way that our society measures success; that you will not obey the rules, when the rules are unjust; that you will act out the courage that I know is in you. There are wonderful people, Black and white, who are models. I don’t mean African-Americans like Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, who have become servants of the rich and powerful. I mean W.E.B. DuBois and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Marian Wright Edelman, and James Baldwin and Josephine Baker and good white folk, too, who defied the Establishment to work for peace and justice.

Another of my students at Spelman, Alice Walker, who, like Marian, has remained our friend all these years, came from a tenant farmer’s family in Eatonton, Georgia, and became a famous writer. In one of her first published poems, she wrote:

It is true —
I’ve always loved
the daring
ones
Like the Black young
man
Who tried
to crash
All barriers
at once,
wanted to swim
At a white
beach (in Alabama)
Nude.

I am not suggesting you go that far, but you can help to break down barriers, of race certainly, but also of nationalism; that you do what you can — you don’t have to do something heroic, just something, to join with millions of others who will just do something, because all of those somethings, at certain points in history, come together, and make the world better.

That marvelous African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who wouldn’t do what white people wanted her to do, who wouldn’t do what Black people wanted her to do, who insisted on being herself, said that her mother advised her: Leap for the sun — you may not reach it, but at least you will get off the ground.

By being here today, you are already standing on your toes, ready to leap My hope for you is a good life.

Copyright © 2005, Howard Zinn

i’m in the process of reading a blog entry by alice walker (yes, that alice walker) about her trip to gaza with CODEPINK.  her story begins with a partial account of her trip to rwanda and then she links gaza and rwanda.  throughout the piece she reminisces about her experience in the south as black woman and she reminds us of the similarities between the palestinians struggle and the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s. it truly is a piece of work from the heart and makes me continue to question my decision to stay here in logan to finish this degree instead of going and doing what i consider is the most noble work of all – being on the ground with the oppressed who’s lives and homes are being ripped apart with the help of my tax dollars.

you should take time and go read the whole post, and to entice you here are a couple excerpts from it:

here she writes of a meeting she had with the american ambassador to egypt (a white woman from the south):

Even so, I was able to have an interesting talk with the Ambassador about the use of non-violence. She, a white woman with a southern accent, mentioned the success of “our” Civil Rights Movement and why couldn’t the Palestinians be more like us. It was a remarkable comment from a perspective of unimaginable safety and privilege; I was moved to tell her of the effort it took, even for someone so inherently non-violent as me, to contain myself during seven years in Mississippi when it often appeared there were only a handful of white Mississippians who could talk to a person of color without delivering injury or insult. That if we had not been able to change our situation through non-violent suffering, we would most certainly, like the ANC, like the PLO, like Hamas, turned to violence. I told her how dishonest it seems to me that people claim not to understand the desperate, last ditch, resistance involved in suicide bombings; blaming the oppressed for using their bodies where the Israeli army uses armored tanks. I remembered aloud, us being Southerners, my own anger at the humiliations, bombings, assassinations that made weeping an endless activity for black people, for centuries, and how when we finally got to a court room which was supposed to offer justice, the judge was likely to blame us for the crime done against us and to call us chimpanzees for making a fuss.

and here she writes about entering gaza:

Rolling into Gaza I had a feeling of homecoming. There is a flavor to the ghetto. To the Bantustan. To the “rez”. To the “colored section.” In some ways it is surprisingly comforting. Because consciousness is comforting. Everyone you see has an awareness of struggle, of resistance, just as you do. The man driving the donkey cart. The woman selling vegetables. The young person arranging rugs on the sidewalk or flowers in a vase. When I lived in segregated Eatonton, Georgia I used to breathe normally only in my own neighborhood, only in the black section of town. Everywhere else was too dangerous. A friend was beaten and thrown in prison for helping a white girl, in broad daylight, fix her bicycle chain. But even this sliver of a neighborhood, so rightly named the Gaza strip, was not safe. It had been bombed for 22 days.

about a lot of stuff.. but on the subject of the proposition 8 decision that came down yesterday…. i’ll just cut to the chase.. being surrounded by a majority religion that does not support equal rights for everyone i’m angry… i’m really angry, and quite hurt.

i actually have friends who do not believe that if i end up partnering with a woman that i am not due the same rights as they are. yeah… as i type this i’m not angry, i’m hurt to the very core of who i am. it blows my mind that anyone can say to someone they call a friend that they aren’t deserving of the same rights – that they are not equal to them. right now – in the wake of this decision yet again, with the wounds still fresh from november, i’m not sure if i really want to be around those friends. i don’t want to go head to head with them about this issue but i don’t know if i can keep quiet about how hurt i am about their feelings. really – it just blows my mind. how can anyone tell a friend that they aren’t due the same rights as they are? and i guess i’m lucky – my family (well, i have no idea about the republicans… but they are episcopalian and i’m hoping members who supported the actions of their church.. feel about it) and those closest to me do not hold such opinions.
Read the rest of this entry »

and this – this letter from dave’s sister in this week’s eugene weekly.

Won’t Pay for WAR
This year I owe $474 in federal taxes. If federal taxes went to life affirming things, I would be happy to pay all that I owed and more. For example, our country could provide a free and appropriate education to all young people between the ages of 3 and 25, including a bachelor’s degree or other post secondary education.  We could provide food, a place to live and free health care to all who need it. All who need free drug, alcohol, gambling and sex addiction treatment could have it provided for them. Our land, water and air could be cleaned up and protected. Global warming could be reversed and alternative energy provided. All people living in this county could be treated with respect and granted the same freedoms.

Instead of programs that affirm life, over half our taxes are going towards killing people in wars. Our taxes are breeding ill will through this country and the world. If our country had not spent so much money on killing people through wars, the financial crisis we are in could have been averted. I can’t condone war by paying for it. I have redirected the $474 I owe into life affirming programs here in Oregon.

Susan P. B, Eugene

there’s a big huge jerk in the utah legislature who:

(from the salt lake tribune) He called the gay-rights movement “probably the greatest threat to America,” likened gay activists to Muslim radicals and dubbed same-sex relationships “abominations.”

and of course there has been a big brewhaha about it here in utah.  here’s my remark to the brewhaha that i just sent in to the logan herald-journal.

Dear Editor -
I have been following the Chris Buttars debacle like many others have.  I have listened to the fact that he is not sorry for his remarks, and I have read as gay rights groups, and others allied with justice for the LGBT community, call for his resignation.  I agree with these calls.  I agree that Mr. Buttars’s remarks were wrong, and that he should be forced to resign from his job.  That anyone can hold office in this day and age and make such ignorant remarks is a s surprise to me.  This is not the point of my letter though.

One point of my letter is to point out that Mr. Buttars also made defamatory remarks about the Muslim community as well.  What I have not read in the news, and please forgive me if I have missed it, is anyone calling Mr. Buttars on those remarks.  I have not noticed the gay rights community calling for alignment with the Muslim community.  I have not noticed people up in arms.

I can bet, for the most part, that those who are reading this letter who agree that Mr. Buttars’s remarks were wrong and out of line hold Dr. King with great reverence, as do I.  If you pay attention to his works beyond his “I have a dream” speech you’ll notice that he was one for forming coalitions with others who are oppressed.  He knew that any form of oppression against anyone was wrong and he understood that there is great power in being an ally for communities you aren’t a member of.

The main point of my letter is to point out that those of us who work for peace and justice, those who are reading this who believe that “no one is free when others are oppressed” need to speak out for the Muslim community as well.  While I am a Christian, I do not believe what Mr. Buttars’s believes – “that the radical Muslim community wants to take over the world.”  I believe that any radical community that uses violence to make it’s point is a threat to world peace and justice.  I just hope that others, besides myself, will remind Mr. Buttars, and those who agree with him, that really – we are all far more the same than we are different.  I hope he gets a chance to travel to the Middle East, or to simply go down to the local mosque and meet the Muslim community and learn what a beautiful religion it is and what a beautiful people that those who are followers of it are.

thank you

on sunday at church we’re going to have a vote about whether to join the covenant network.  the covenant network is:

The Covenant Network of Presbyterians is a broad-based, national group of clergy and lay leaders working for a church that is simultaneously faithful, just, and whole. We seek to support the mission and unity of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in a time of potentially divisive controversy. We intend to articulate and act on the church’s historic, progressive vision and to work for a fully inclusive church.

according to pastor p it was formed after the general assembly of the church put language about being married to a member of the opposite sex in the ordination rules (or single and chaste).  yes, it was formed around lgbt issues.

i have to admit to being nervous about this vote, because while pastor p is wonderful and all the members of the church are wonderful, not everyone thinks we should be a part of the network.  not everyone thinks we should flaunt that we’re friendly to the lgbt community, and i suspect that there are those within the congregation who don’t think we should be welcome, and that openly l/g folks should never be ordained.

the previous 3 sundays we’ve had discussions about lgbt issues.  the discussions have not been easy for me and they’ve been difficult for others. those who haven’t attended the meetings have been given the opportunity to write a letter about how they feel about this move.  i hear that most of these letters have been dissenting voices.  i actually worry about the conversation on sunday and as the day gets closer, i’m getting nervous (i can’t even imagine how pastor p is feeling).

thus far i’ve attended 3 or 4 other whole congregation meetings.  they were pretty calm affairs and pastor p says that this is how presbyterians do things.  somehow i suspect that this meeting won’t be a calm affair, or if it’s calm, it certainly won’t be silent.  i’m not sure if i’ll say something or not and if i do i just hope it’s from the peace loving side of my heart that is sad about the fact that there are people who may vote against this and not the angry righteous side of my heart that protects the sad side.

i also hope that we end up voting yes to join the covenant network and that it ends out being a great thing for the church.

says bishop gene robinson.

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama
By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson
Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah. Read the rest of this entry »

i got to see tim wise speak here at utah state last wednesday.  he spoke as a part of the black student caucas’s martin luther king, jr. day commemoration.   tim is nationally known speaker on white-privilege.  this is a topic that i’ve been exploring for the past few years, and as a white person who believes in social justice, i feel is an important to talk about.  in fact i believe i need to spend more time reading and thinking about the subject – especially as a white-middle class-highly educated-pretty straight-protestant christian-westerner.  i need to understand my privilege and how i use it, subconsciously, to continue cycles of oppression.  if i were feeling a bit more studious i would transcribe his speech and put it here, but i’m not feeling that way.  instead here’s one of tim wise’s essays.  enjoy – and go read more of his stuff.  (published w/o his permission).

A God with Whom I am not Familiar
By Tim Wise
Published on Counterpunch.org, 9/2/05, and widely syndicated, nationally

This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in Nashville, at lunchtime, with the Brooks Brothers shirt:

You don’t know me. But I know you.

I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans. Read the rest of this entry »

john shuck pointed me to an excellent article by brian mclaren about actually being able to talk about gaza, with people on the opposite side of the issue. thanks john! (and cherice! and brian m!) here’s a snippet – and then go read the rest on your own.

Rule No. 2: Acknowledge the real issues on the other side. Minnesota U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim in Congress, models this in his recent press release when he says that he has been in Sderot and has “seen firsthand both the physical and emotional destruction caused by the rocket attacks”. That acknowledgment doesn’t take away from something else that Ellison says – which is that conditions in Gaza are “unliveable”. It merely means that Ellison has the eyes and the heart to imagine life on both sides of the fence.

In Status Quo Rules, recognizing the challenge on the other side makes you a traitor. In the Solution Rulebook, it makes you a true patriot, because it’s the fastest way to build trust with the people you have to build peace with.

here’s the rest of brian’s excellent thoughts on building bridges in the middle east (that really could be applied to other conflicts as well).