peace

Dear Martin

Martin Luther King, Jr. 1929-1968 by Caboindex Flickr/creative commons

Martin Luther King, Jr.
1929-1968
by Caboindex
Flickr/creative commons

Dear Martin . . . How happy I am today to see the next generation fully embrace the ideals that identified your short life: the end of poverty, racism, and war, precepts to which I have continued to dedicate my life.

With numerous conferences and forums throughout your birthday weekend, before and after, your mass of followers are playing an invigorating and crucial role right now in schooling the mass of newly minted young activists who are fully committed to ending the murder of young black people, and all attempts to erase an entire race through mass incarceration and domestic and foreign policies favoring whites. This new, gigantic effort is committed to non-violent means to solve these conflicts, a true testament to your life’s work.

As an idealistic teen growing up in post-war America, your ideals called to me as they still do. As a pre-teen I  came into contact with young freedom rider friends of my (Jewish) family who were helping black southerners register to vote, and challenge a rigged system (that is today being re-rigged, unfortunately). I became an activist working throughout the 1960s and 70s, putting more than just boots on the ground in protest of the Vietnam War. Your life and work were the keys that completed my full radicalization, and still motivate my activism today.

In our youth, you and I wrongly supposed that, “Oh, this is going to be solved next week because our arguments were so persuasive and the evidence so damning!” But it wasn’t solved in a week. Instead, it is being solved by the generation we gave birth to.

Today, more than ever before in history, legacy and new activists are working together, communicating through free mass communications, bringing about co-equal citizens of the world who fully envision that better and more humane future: a happy and healthy cohabitation of world citizens in place of the corporatized, enslaving stranglehold by a small number of elites (all old, white, men).

Your dream is becoming a reality, Martin. Your deep compassion for all of humanity is in full flower. It’s just taking this long because it turned out there was and is so much work to do. Nevertheless, we are reveling in this major step forward in out quest for Peace.

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Shamans Discover Special Interests

The shaman is presented as the intercessor between man and nature spirits Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra Flicker/creative commons

The shaman is presented as the intercessor between man and nature spirits
Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra
Flicker/creative commons

A primitive man who lived in a cave a long, long time ago once abstracted the idea that you can make a living, even a very good living as a shaman. He was largely self-appointed to intercede between and on behalf of other men and the existing natural resources. Most important, he consulted on what actions would be good luck or bad luck for individuals, families, and the tribe. This shaman reaped economic wealth and social advantages for his efforts that supported his own survival. The concept of special interest was born.

Special interest people take something, anything, an idea, a water source, or even an entire industry or government or church, and define it apart from the whole for some measure of personal profit.

Anthropologists or others might argue the value of some of these special interests in building the foundation of today’s technologically-advanced world. It may or may not be true that such an incautious approach that ignored special interests was ever warranted; that’s the past and we can’t change that anyhow. But having arrived at world-wide communication, individuals finally can see the special interests laid bare.

For the first time, people power can be active, no longer passive. Humanity is now looking differently at each of these special interests and deciding what’s worth preserving and building upon, those that chiefly consider and benefit the whole without any thought of personal profit. And which special interest systems are inhumane, coercive, exploitative, enslaving, profiteering and need to be left behind in the pre-technological era, their stories to be told someday just like we look at the shaman’s cave wall drawings.

All that profiteering special interests represent is counter to our survival. Their purpose is no more. There is no future in these scaffolding ideas. Without the pall of special interests all around us we will be able to rescue civilization from the impending climatic disaster brought on by men burning fuels for the last hundred years, repossess all of our human rights, and usher in universal plurality in all decision-making, local and global, otherwise defined as Peace.

Become a part of this revolution today.

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Climate Change Dangers Are ‘Higher Than Ever’: UN Report
Full UN Climate Change Report

 

 

 

Love Pierces Hate

by Rafee Jewell Flickr/cretaive commons

by Rafee Jewell
Flickr/cretaive commons

 

After a week of writing about the senseless murder of Michael Brown, a young, unarmed African-Americn in Ferguson, Missouri, by a white policeman, I’ve spent the last few days reading posts we have written over the past few years, and those from other authors, condemning racism. It’s become a meditation on the racism upon which this country was founded.

Fear of other did not begin with America. Fear of something different than yourself springs from caveman DNA, and it is only the gradual grasp of Love, in your intellect and in actuality of the Love you express, that raises anyone above the primitive. When we evolve as individuals, and as a mass of humanity, to be able to reject fear as a way of life, the earth and its people tick closer to a world built on Love. This is a world where every child is born with its personal autonomy intact, where governments, corporations, religious hierarchies, or local custom do not rob us of mutual equality. This is the age of universal plurality, the only pathway to Peace, the only future that applies to all people.

Organized religion has done the most to retard this evolution away from the primitive. From the earliest shamans, humans have been exploited by greedy (and lazy) interlopers presuming to come between us and the reality of love, something we can actually feel flow into, through, and out of our own bodies.

To the extent that our successes or our happiness sits atop the exploitation of others, the love in our lives is an illusion, a mental appetizer only of what could be. Every decision we make is a personal moral question. There is no morality greater than one person, despite what religious hierarchies and others would have you believe. No decision is based on what others think or tell you because if you just quiet your mind for a moment you know exactly what each decision is and where it will lead. At that moment you know whether you are choosing love over hate, mutual support over exclusion, purpose over failure. It is not only our intellect or even our heart that guides us, although they are helpful. It is recognition of the underlying and inescapable ecology of Love, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. Consciously or unconsciously we understand in our gut that love has a future and that hate dies on the vine, however long that might take.

The founders of Amerika, and everyone since, sprung from a white supremacist point of view. First up? The eradication of the non-white natives. Next? The ruthless exploitation of black people brought to this country against their will, permanently indentured to the whim of their white owners. Now? Closing our borders selectively because white people fear that we are fast becoming a blended brown nation.

Every white person, individually and collectively, knows they are consciously choosing hate or at least something short of Love, whenever and wherever they are unwilling to give up the systemic exploitation and enslavement of those they consider “other.”

The only future for white people in this country is to embrace Love of their fellows by silencing the haters. We have to call the haters out in capital letters, on a daily basis. The legacy of Michael Brown and his family is giving this country an ideal platform to recognize this country’s racists roots, and to make amends by finding ways to make things right.

“Not everything that is faced can be chaged;
but nothing can be changed until it is faced
James Baldwin (1924 – 1987)
American novelist, essayist, playwright,
poet, and social critic

Our Horrible Days

How Do We Respond to This Really Horrible Day?

“It’s too late to reverse the death and destruction, but it’s never too early to advocate for peace and life.” — 

by Alfonso Flickr/creative commons

by Alfonso
Flickr/creative commons

Just 3 days ago, believing things are getting worse at a faster pace than ever before, we revisited Where Does of All This F*cking Evil Sh%t Come From? to offer up some explanation of why the world seems to be plummeting downward.

Yesterday, everything got much worse.

While the media was fixed on the passenger jet that was shot out of the sky by Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists, ground troops started rolling into Gaza with seeming impunity. Today, I am publishing in full Raushenbush’s thoughtful, 400-word call for action — we are fast losing our humanity but each of us must recognize that we are not impotent.

GAZA

What a horrible day. Israel has begun a ground offensive in Gaza, the White House is on lockdown, and a plane has been shot down in Ukraine. Today’s news piles on an already shaking landscape of ISIS in Iraq, immigrant children suffering on the U.S. border, and still missing Nigerian girls. My Twitter feed has been raging with information and disinformation today, but underneath the diatribes I have been struck by a sense of despair and disbelief that the world can unravel this fast, and anger at our sense of impotence.

But we are not impotent, and this is not “happening to us.” We, the human race, are doing this to ourselves. These aren’t natural disasters, or “acts of God.” It’s just us, humans, having completely lost our humanity. We are warring, and hurting, and intentionally or unintentionally killing one another through direct assault or indifference and neglect.

We have forgotten that we belong to one another, that we are connected, that we are all sisters and brothers, that we need one another.

Today, right now, I want us to take back our power, and begin to mend together what has been ripped apart.

It is too late to bring back the innocent lives that have been lost so far in the Middle East, but it is not too late to stop the killing that is happening now.

It is too late to bring back the innocent plane passengers who died in Ukraine, but as a human race we can insist that this is unacceptable and not let the incident be a springboard for even more violence and hatred.

It’s too late to reverse the death and destruction, but it’s never too early to advocate for peace and life.

It is hard to know what to do, but, even within this dark day, we need to continue to insist on the possibility of peace — and to have that start with ourselves. If all I can do today is pray for peace and the well-being of both Israelis and Palestinians and refuse to accept that war is inevitable or hate is natural, that will be a start. If I can pray for the people in that plane and try not to be swept into a rage calling for revenge, if I can make myself open to being an instrument of peace, then that will be a start. That is one, very small, way that I can respond to this horrible day.

Each person who loses their life for no reason represents a tragedy. What would each person have done to contribute to a better world? There were 100 experts heading to an AIDS conference in Malaysia, for example. When will it end? What can you do to make the world better today by advocating for peace and life?