As I channel-surfed from Green 960 (Air America) to Hot Talk 560 in the car this morning, I stopped on 560 long enough to listen to Rush Limbaugh ranting about the climate change “hoax” he says we’ve all been duped by and the tobacco industry’s lies way back when claiming that there was no proof that smoking caused cancer. I found it strange that Rush was connecting the two together, and wondered if he realized that the folks that lied about smoking back in the day happen to be the same folks that have been lying about global warming.

Swords to Plowshares director Michael Blecker (right) talks with veteran John Hall at the agency in San Francisco. Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

Pentagon bean counters see an extra $40 billion in annual costs if President Obama sends 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan, but Michael Blecker sees mainly this:

More than 13,000 new cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. An additional 8,000 or so traumatic brain injuries.

To all American readers: I trust you had a fine Thanksgiving. Our son was home and we did the nuclear family thing and went to two fun movies that we all three enjoyed a bunch: “Pirate Radio,” about the radio station I used to listen to at high school in England, and “2012,” which you wouldn’t think would be fun as it involves the death of almost all life on earth, but it’s so fantastic and unrealistic while being brilliantly presented and curiously full of humanity (though unforgivably as much a male-run world as that of Pirate Radio without any historical excuse for it), that we just sat back and lived through the roller coaster ride.

Back in reality, if I was blogging today, which I’m not, being about to go off with the family to do a token soup kitchen stint and then put the lad on his plane back to college in LA, I might have mentioned this beautifully written article about the poverty-stricken state of education in California, by a woman who teaches in a rich school and a poor school simultaneously, or this about the cost of pre-school ($12,000 to $20,000) in San Francisco or this about a school for dropouts that works, run by a convicted bank robber and a former methamphetamine user.

The wider story to the recent student sit ins at Cal State schools protesting firings of low income workers and huge increases in student fees is that California, which once had the best financed education in the country now has almost the worst. It all goes back to a citizen revolt against property taxes, Prop 13, passed in 1978, and it’s taken this long for it to bankrupt the state and there are many more bills to pay arising from the high cost of inadequate educations for low income Californians. More on it here and Krugman on it here.

The Cal Berkeley bigwig who said in his younger years he would have joined the students, but now saw that the state didn’t have the resources, should have seen the light, bitten the bullet and led the students in calling for reversal of Prop 13. He could have marched on Sacramento at the head of a thousand students. It worked for the farmworkers.

And my sister sent me this from London about their massive and cool climate change protest planned for Dec 12.

My wife Debi Clifford wrote this today to our two senators (Feinstein and Boxer) and our newly elected Representative, John Garamendi. It’s easy enough to sign the form letters and petitions but she’s been wanting to find time for a while to write this one that gives her own experience. Here are links for writing your own personal emails to your Representatives and Senators, and some guidelines for how to do it. If you want to snail mail the letter, do it to their offices in their home state, not to Washington, where mail to Congress is subject to all kinds of security delays.

Dear Congressman Garamendi

PLEASE SUPPORT THE PUBLIC OPTION and do not support the trigger proposal. A public healthcare option is the fastest way to put this economy back on track–despite the huge financial investment required. This is a long-term economic stimulus plan that will put money DIRECTLY into the pockets of hard-working Americans and greatly reduce the horrifying financial impact of rising health care costs—especially for the massive numbers of under- and unemployed throughout the country.

As someone who has been unemployed twice in the last two years, I can tell you how awful it is to have your health care tied to employment which suddenly vanishes. When I was laid off, I had to move to unaffordable COBRA–and didn’t qualify for the federal subsidy because of the regulation’s technicality that I was ineligible for the subsidy because I was eligible for my spouse’s (even MORE unaffordable) health care plan. This forced me to go with COBRA and switch to the least expensive plan I could that would allow me to stay with my current providers during a period of major health problems.

PLEASE DELINK HEALTH CARE FROM EMPLOYMENT and ensure that all Americans can access affordable health care.

From www.enduswars.org

This message, left on our Tikkun home site here, deserves to be more widely read:

Dear Friends,

Our organization, End US Wars, is holding an Emergency Anti-Escalation Rally on December 12 at Lafayette Park at the White House, Washington DC, from 11am to 4pm.

Featured speakers include: Cynthia McKinney, Senator Mike Gravel, Chris Hedges, David Swanson, Kathy Kelly, Betty Hall, Granny D (message), Lynne Williams, Elaine Brower, Mathis Chiroux, Michael Knox, Ron Fisher and others. We are very excited about so many illustrious speakers, with more in the offing. Musical performers include Jordan Page.

We expect to do a lot of action in DC around the time of Obama’s announcement. We also are planning events the evening of December 11th–a Green Party event, authors book signings, and Greenwald’s new movie on Afghanistan.

1) The US Has a Mercenary Army.
Since the ancient world conscription has been a fundamental principle for all democratic and republican forms of government. The reason is obvious. When people are going to die for a cause, they should spread the risks evenly. In 1974 the United States abolished the draft, supposedly temporarily, for one reason. If there were a draft Americans would never tolerate the kind of adventure in which Obama is engaging. The people who support this war are relying on the poor, often racial minorities, to fight for them: people who have no opportunity for jobs and education other than what the military provides. Ask the supporters if they would support the war if they had to fight, or their children.

2) The Taliban Will Not Take Over.
Everyone knows by this point that there are more “safe havens” for terrorists in Hamburg, London or the Paris banlieues than in Afghanistan. Supporters of the war argue, rather, that the Taliban will return if America doesn’t expand the war, and that the Taliban will protect “Al Queda,” whatever that may actually be.

This argument rests on a little knowledge: the Taliban did run the country from 1994 to 2001. However, they are much too weak to take it back. The reason the Taliban gained power in 1994 was that Pakistan backed them as an anti-India ally, as did Saudi Arabia, because of their anti-Shia policies. Behind Pakistan and Saudi Arabia was the United States, which created the fundamentalist movement in Afghanistan in the first place as a way to hurt the Soviet Union. The Taliban will not return to power if Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US do not back them.

3) The Messenger Is Not Reliable
Obama supporters claim that during his campaign he promised to wage this war in Afghanistan. This is not true. Obama ran as the antiwar candidate, filling the vacuum left by Hillary Clinton’s refusal to apologize for her vote supporting the war in Iraq. He did often refer to Afghanistan but had he ever said he want to expand that war, Hillary Clinton would be in the White House today.

Only a few weeks after taking office, on March 27, 2009, Obama sent 34,000 new troops to Afghanistan (21,000 combat troops and 13,000), announcing “a comprehensive, new strategy,” the conclusion of “a careful policy review, led by Bruce [Reidel].” In May he fired General David McKiernan, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, and appointed McChrystal. This was only the third time in American history that a General was fired out from under his own command during a war. McChrystal’s memo asking for another 40,000 troops appeared on September 20, 2009. Anyone who believes that McChrystal leaked that memo without clearing it with his boss doesn’t understand America. Since September, Obama has engaged in his usual shell game, meant to demonstrate his thoughtfulness, reflectivity, listening to all sides and all the rest of it. Please give me a break. He is every bit the liar that Bush was, appearances notwithstanding.

There’s a column worth reading by Kristof  today, on liberal views about God, notably by Robert Wright and Karen Armstrong. E.g. this:

Mr. Wright detects an evolution toward an image of God as a more beneficient and universal deity, one whose moral compass favors compassion for humans of whatever race or tribe, one who is now firmly in the antigenocide camp. Mr. Wright’s focus is not on whether God exists, but he does suggest that changing perceptions of God reflect a moral direction to history — and that this in turn perhaps reflects some kind of spiritual force.

Be Scofield, my friend and fellow blogger on this site has a low opinion of Robert Wright, especially his idea that there is moral progress, an arrow to history. I like the idea, and think it has historical value. Be says it’s nonsense and Wright is so sanguine about neoliberal globalization that it puts him in collusion with some of the most immoral forces in our world today. Maybe I’ll get the energy up to debate Be, who you can see from his first post here is an energetic debater. Or maybe he’ll convince me. It’s not over yet.

I haven’t discussed Karen Armstrong with Be but I hope he likes her or we’ll have a real argument. I have to say her memoir The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out Of Darkness is one of my favorite books. (I wrote briefly about her here, and Peter Marmorek has blogged about taking part in her Charter of Compassion project). Kristof on her new book:

Another best-seller this year, Karen Armstrong’s “The Case for God,” likewise doesn’t posit a Grandpa-in-the-Sky; rather, she sees God in terms of an ineffable presence that can be neither proven nor disproven in any rational sense. To Ms. Armstrong, faith belongs to the realm of life’s mysteries, beyond the world of reason, and people on both sides of the “God gap” make the mistake of interpreting religious traditions too literally.

“Over the centuries people in all cultures discovered that by pushing their reasoning powers to the limit, stretching language to the end of its tether, and living as selflessly and compassionately as possible, they experienced a transcendence that enabled them to affirm their suffering with serenity and courage,” Ms. Armstrong writes.

“The forms in my work are derivative of nightmares I had when I was a child. My fodder is junk mail, litter, waste, and nightmares. My job is to transform these things into art.” — Aurora Robson

When something terrible happens, it might someday somehow be transformed into something less terrible — this is the personal belief to which I most stubbornly cling.

This isn’t idealism. It’s alchemy, the transformation of something of no value or little value into something useful, something beautiful.

Honeybees are alchemists. Sewage plant workers are alchemists. Anyone who has ever picked up litter, watered a seed, raised a child, started a business, or strung words together into a meaningful sentence is an alchemist.

It is in that core of my basic optimistic nature, in that tiny place where I believe alchemy is true, that I am beholden to the creations of artist Aurora Robson.

Robson’s dynamic, flowing installations and sculptures are constructed from discarded plastic bottles reclaimed from the wastebasket of America’s streets.

(To see more of Aurora Robson’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

The sheik, the minister and the rabbi

If you are interested in interfaith work don’t miss this: “Three Clergymen, Three Faiths, One Friendship.” So many interfaith efforts involve avoiding each other’s hot buttons. This is how to do it:

The three say they became close not by avoiding or glossing over their conflicts, but by running straight at them. They put everything on the table: the verses they found offensive in one another’s holy books, anti-Semitism, violence in the name of religion, claims by each faith to have the exclusive hold on truth, and, of course, Israel.

“One of the problems in the past with interfaith dialogue is we’ve been too unwilling to upset each other,”

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from psychotherapist and online columnist, Allen Roland. Dr. Roland is best known for his work on the Unified Field. More information on Dr. Roland and the Unified Field can be found on his blog.

THE UNIFIED FIELD

The basic underlying and uniting force of the universe is a psychic energy field of love and soul consciousness (the Unified Field), which lies not only beyond time and space but also beneath our deepest fears ~ and whose principle property is the universal urge to unite.

Finding the Unified Field was an act of surrender. Owning and proving it has been an act of courage. Initially, it was surrendering to and embracing an alone little boy within myself who always knew this truth. Then it was a slow process of finding the courage to stand alone, own my truth, and speak it, regardless of the risks.

Let me make this clear – every tenet of my Unified Field is based on my own personal experience and my experience with my clients. Which is why it took eight years for me to fully prove it, after I had written it, and which is why I no longer call it a theory.

What follows are the three basic tenets of the Unified Field.

Thanksgiving reminds us: Life is a feast.

Thanksgiving is also a moment to consider a commensal ethics.

The earth is a banquet table full of scrumptious delights to nourish us and to give us pleasure. It is full of animal, vegetable and mineral living in ecological harmony for the sake of sustenance and joy. Mountains tower. Trees stand. Grasses grow. Rivers run. Lakes and bays and oceans ebb and flow. Birds fly. Fish swim. Herds run. Predators kill. Humankind thinks and builds. There is enough for all except when the world disturbs the balance. Our religion, culture, politics and economics too often upset the equilibrium.

For the canaries in the coal mine, the first whiff of gas is no time for thanksgiving. The second will likely kill them. But the miners who notice and get the hell out give thanks for the dead canaries.

I have a liking for canaries because an eminent friend of my mother’s, the Maharani of Kutch, smuggled hers in on a visit to England but got caught when leaving, and had to give it at the airport to my mother, who gave it to me. It was the only pet I had as a child in our big religious communal house. I always felt for the canaries in the coal mines.

Are you a canary? The canary metaphor gets invoked for all the early warning types — and I imagine most Tikkun Daily readers are included in that number. Human canaries see or sense disaster coming. It’s hard to feel thankful when you are terrified that your country in all its furious energy is leading civilization more or less rapidly to destruction. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, if you are not seriously scared about global warming, world poverty, chemicals in the food chain, species extinctions, human cruelty, and human passivity in face of such problems, then you will have an easier time tomorrow at Thanksgiving than the rest of us.

In this gruesome canary metaphor, the equivalent of the miners — the people today who are just going about business as usual — will not end up being grateful to us canaries if we just expire from fear or burnout. Fortunately for us it’s not our deaths that will help. And it’s not just our ability to sniff the air and foresee possible doom that will help.

Perhaps recent leaders of Israel might made better choices had they spent more time reading Sherlock Holmes. Of particular use to them might have been The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet in which Holmes says, “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Then they might have realized that the result of making a two-state solution impossible was to make a one-state solution inevitable. Having worked to weaken Palestine, to undermine all Palestinian leaders, to create – in Sharon’s memorable phrase for the settlements – facts on the ground they are now like a go player who having focused exclusively on a specific battle over territory suddenly looks at the bigger picture and realizes he’s lost the game.

We are now at that point of realization. Almost 10% of Israeli Jews now live in the Territories or in East Jerusalem. It would be impossible for any Israeli government to make a peace offer to Palestinians that would give up those homes and settlements: in Israeli politics, their coalition would instantly disappear. (And it’s unlikely they could do it militarily: the BBC reports that , “An increasing number of Israeli soldiers are publicly objecting, on religious and political grounds, to their role in the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.”) Similarly, it would not be possible for any Palestinian leader to accept the kind of offer any Israeli leader might realistically make: his support would also disappear. The handful of bantustans offered as a Palestinian country at Oslo might have been the closest to a joint solution ever reached. And if a two-state solution is impossible,as seems increasingly clear, then the only alternative, however improbable, is a one-state solution.

I loved the comments at yesterday’s post “What are YOU grateful for?” On Sunday I was thinking about how many things I have to be grateful for, and wondering which I would choose to mention if I wrote a gratitude post every day until Thanksgiving. Tony Roeber’s “I am grateful just for being alive and breathing…” has it all in a sentence. Jason Hamza van Boom’s items are wonderfully eclectic and specific. Today I want to mention story.

People say a picture is worth a thousand words. There isn’t such a pithy saying — but there should be — about story: a good story is worth a thousand pages of conceptual analysis. The Bible is mostly stories, and how much analysis and interpretation has that provoked, without ever running out of more possibilities and depths. Most ancient holy texts are stories, aren’t they?

As the Library Journal wrote: "Cunningham weaves Hebrew scripture, Celtic and Egyptian mythology, and early Christian legend into a nearly seamless whole, creating an unforgettable fifth gospel story in which the women most involved in Jesus's ministry are given far more representation."

Not every book of fiction or history is or has to be a story. But when I am in a mood for story, rather than conceptual analysis and complex evocation, the first thing I want is authority in the storytellers’ voice: the tone that says, sit down, get comfy, I’m going to enthrall you. I had an art critic friend who hated Speilberg’s movies, because he found them so manipulative. But I thought of a bard at an ancient campfire, spinning tales to wrap her listeners up in other worlds, and thought, wasn’t she manipulating them and isn’t that the essence of a good storyteller? We give ourselves over, uncritically, to be drawn in. Later, we can do the analysis.

So I have my favorites, as you do, but I thought that I would mention one storyteller who fills me with wonder and amazement, whom you may well not have read. This bard, a singer of the blues and a writer of realistic fantasy, is right on the mark for any spiritual progressives who wonder how Jesus would have reacted to a female equal or, if you never wondered about that, who is building a religion that fully celebrates the female as well as the male and all variations of such.

Imagine placing a fully autonomous, free woman into the Jesus story, as his peer: in some way immortal, divine, able to perform miracles, hold her own and become his lover and partner without becoming his disciple. Historically absurd, right?

One of our most read posts this month was “Practical loving ways to heal through chronic illness” by our friend Dr. Abby Caplin, who has also written for our print magazine, here and here. She asked us if we were going to be writing about the woman who was arrested at the Western Wall, and I asked if she would write it, and she did. For more information and analysis about the incident check out the Israel Religious Action Center’s facebook page, the Women of the Wall, and Richard Silverstein’s post at Tikun Olam.

It’s Simply Prayer. WOW!

by Abby Caplin

Nofrat Frenkel, left, with Anat Hoffman, Director of the Israel Religious Action Center and Women of the Wall, before the arrest at the Wall.

When I learned that the young medical student Nofrat Frenkel was arrested at the Kotel (The Western Wall) in Jerusalem for praying while wearing a tallit (Jewish prayer shawl) on November 18th, I felt sick. The refrain of a song went through my head: “I’m tired of being smooth. I’m tired of being nice. I’m tired of making it sound all pretty…” by Laura Love.

It’s not pretty. It’s disgusting that a woman can’t wear her tallit, something many women around the world have been wearing for decades, at Israel’s most holy site, without being abused and arrested. It’s an embarrassment, and it has to end. If women don’t want to wear one, that’s fine. But to wear a tallit is beautiful. I’ve been wearing one for years. It’s part of me, and helps me connect to Shechinah (God). It’s funny how something so feminine has been co-opted by Orthodoxy as a masculine ritual object.

Bill Distler, a war vet on disability who organizes anti-war action in Washington State, and has written here before, tells me he has been working on this article for about six weeks but now’s the time to get it out into the conversation, before Obama tells us what he’s made up his mind to do.

General McChrystal has Plans for Afghanistan

by Bill Distler

Obama and McChrystal on Air Force One, 11/2/2009. (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)

The New York Times Magazine recently had a long article about General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. The article examined the general’s counterinsurgency plan for “success”. The Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently claimed that General McChrystal is the world’s foremost counterterrorism expert because in Iraq he led a program “killing thousands of bad guys.” Mr. Krauthammer’s intended compliment turns out to be proof of General McChrystal’s unfitness to represent the United States.

A picture in the Times article showed the general with Ranger and Special Forces patches on his sleeve. He must be strong and brave, and that’s fine. But for our country, the more important questions are: is he compassionate and is he wise? Because strength and bravery without compassion and wisdom are worse than useless, they are destructive.

There has been some buzz about this proposed march and here’s the latest email about it, in full, below. First, a Tikkun editorial statement, endorsing the nonviolent aspirations of the march leaders, but written out of an appreciation that true nonviolence at its most effective is a hard thing indeed to achieve when anger is high:

We hope that this challenge to Israel’s treatment to Gaza can happen in a way that rejects the “bash Israel” perspective that sometimes accompanies these demonstrations. We believe that more will be accomplished by the nonviolent flavor of a Martin Luther King, Jr.-led demonstration than by a demonstration that can easily be portrayed as filled with “hate-Israel” types. We understand the anger created by the murder of hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza last year, and we support the call for a full investigation suggested by The Goldstone Report to the U.N. But we believe that the demonstrations would be far more significant if done in a way that reassured the Israeli people that their legitimate grievance at the shelling of Israeli civilians by Hamas in the months before the war in Gaza was taken by the demonstrators was also being acknowledged, thereby conveying that the solution sought by peace forces recognizes that the larger struggle between Israel and Palestine is too complex to fit in any “good guys vs. bad guys” scenario.

The official announcement:

Historic Gaza Freedom March to Israeli Border Set For December 31

Global grassroots initiative inspired by Gandhi/Mandela aims to break blockade

Please use the comments to let us know!

Razi (865 - 925 CE)

If I stop to think what I have to be grateful for the list gets way long. Here are a few of the things that could very well be filling my heart as I hold hands with my family around the Thanksgiving table on Thursday, though I know I won’t say even this starter list because the meal will get cold if I do. Just saying “thanks for our health” will cover a lot of this, but how inadequately! I am grateful for:

• still having a job in this recession. With good health benefits. Thanks to all of you are still buying magazines and donating to Tikkun!
• “Western” or allopathic medicine. Just for starters in my small family I (cancer), my wife and son (caesarian birth), and my sister (meningitis) would all be dead long since without it. By the way “Western” doesn’t cover it when we recall great scientific physicians like the “founder of pediatrics,” the Persian, Razi, who learned from the Indians as well as Persians and Greeks.
• Socialized medicine. The way my mother, in England, was looked after in her Alzheimers years by nurses who came in morning and night so my father could keep her at home as he wished was something to be seen. It was all free and well managed on the National Health Service (NHS).
• I am also grateful that despite his low income my father was able to hire a wonderful woman to come in during the daytime to help, and who stayed after my mother died and my father entered his own dementia.
• Alternative medicine.
  
  

You may have seen the UNICEF report that came out this week. What did you notice most about it? My wife read out bits of it from the newspaper at breakfast and she was just delighted. Can you believe this! she said:

the number of deaths of children under 5 decreased from around 12.5 million in 1990 to an estimated 8.8 million in 2008 – a 28 percent decline.

The number of children not attending primary school also dropped, from 115 million in 2002 to 101 million in 2007, the report said.

I said, great! I’ll blog about it, I like to write up good news. She said this was a result all but two of the nations of the world signing on to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Guess which two nations, she added with disgust: Somalia and the US. And guess why:

Derrick Jensen wants to destroy civilization. The well known author, environmental activist, philosopher and “anarcho-primitivist” argues we should speed up the impending collapse of the global industrial society because when “civilization” collapses the aftermath won’t be as bad as if we simply allowed it to collapse on its own. He asks, “Do you believe that this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?” Most respond no. He then continues, “How would this understanding – that this culture will not voluntarily stop destroying the natural world, eliminating indigenous cultures, exploiting the poor, and killing those who resist – shift our strategy and tactics? The answer? Nobody knows, because we never talk about it: we’re too busy pretending the culture will undergo a magical transformation.”