For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. And from the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, most recently supporting Palestinians in the occupied territories.

After spending last week with Starhawk, I realized that she’s a “meta-activist,” a node of many different types of activism, and a font of knowledge about how to act most effectively when demonstrating, educating, and building a new world. She’s been active in the women’s movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, in creating greater sustainability and a permaculture for the Earth, as well as in supporting Palestinian non-violence for the creation of a Palestinian state. Fortunately for all of us, as an active workshop presenter, Star has been passing along what she’s learned in all these areas. I interviewed her about two of those movements, the two p’s: Palestine and permaculture, and want to share those interviews over the next few days, beginning with her thoughts about Palestine.

This past December, Star planned to participate in the Gaza Freedom March, a demonstration of 1,400 people from 38 different countries that included a large contingent from France. The purpose of this gathering was to bring in much-needed humanitarian supplies as well as to call attention to the inhumane conditions in Gaza after the yearlong Israeli blockade that followed their bombing of Gaza.

As you may recall, Israel attacked about a year ago in response to rockets that Hamas shot into Israeli settlements. As Star reiterated in her comments, the international demonstrators came to support Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israel, and in no way condoned Hamas’ hostility. But Israeli aggression a year ago worsened an already difficult situation in Gaza, killing 1400 people, destroying 4,000 homes and 88 public buildings. Since then the Israeli blockade has kept needed supplies from reaching Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in abject poverty, malnutrition, and bad drinking water, as well as a lack of building materials and equipment to rebuild the devastated area. The state of affairs has deteriorated to the point where Gaza has become essentially an open-air prison with little to keep it going.

flickrcc/morning-theft

This week’s spiritual wisdom is entitled “Prayer for a New Beginning” and is written by Tikkun reader Sulha Shalomi:

Dear God,

We cannot ask President Obama to be or do what we ourselves, in our hearts and minds, are not willing to be or do. When we ask for President Obama to have the courage of his convictions, may we also receive this grace. When we ask that he remember who he is and reclaim his vision and highest and best unfolding, may we likewise be blessed. When we ask that he promote peace and reconciliation among peoples and countries, may we also be graced with peace in all of our relationships and interactions in the home, workplace, and community. When we ask that his faith be strengthened, and that he be shown a clear path to allow his vision to become reality, may we also understand that we, too, will be shown a path. May we have the same courage and willingness to accept it and walk it, strong in knowing that we are not alone, but walk hand-in-hand with our Creator – hand-in-hand with each other, regardless of where we are. That as we forgive President Obama for not (yet) fulfilling his campaign promises, we forgive ourselves for our own short-comings, for all the times we chose to take the path of least resistance instead of forging the new one we had been shown. That as we ask President Obama to step out in faith and courage without seeing the bridge beneath him, may we be willing to do the same, in our own lives, each and every day.

Editor’s Note: Last week, AlterNet ran an article that featured a piece by Chris Hedges and another by Rabbi Michael Lerner, titled: “Should Progressives Give Up on Obama?” The article incited lively debate in the comments section and now, Rabbi Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and head of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, has penned a response to the article’s comments addressed to him by AlterNet readers. It follows here.

The dispute between me and Hedges is about what is the best strategy to rebuild a powerful anti-corporate movement, not about whether or not we like Obama’s policies. As editor of Tikkun, I’ve been outspoken in opposition to his war in Afghanistan, his continuation of the human rights violations of the Bush administration, his handing trillions to banks and investment companies rather than creating a national bank to fund social projects and allowing the privately owned banks to be dealt with by the “free marketplace” that conservatives have been praising all these decades, his failure to support Medicare for Everyone (single-payer) health care reform and instead embracing policies that will further enrich the insurance companies and pharmaceuticals, his support of “cap and trade” rather than a carbon tax to stem global warming, his capitulation to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu rather than using American power to end the Occupation of the West Bank, his rejection of the Goldstone recommendations on Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza, his support for firing teachers in Rhode Island for working at a school that did not meet the teach-to-the-test absurdities of No Child Left Behind rather than question the validity of the goals that are measured by that legislation, and the list goes on and on and on.

These terrible policies are plenty reason to be angry at the Obama Administration. But they have not provoked a huge outcry, even among those most adversely impacted by those policies. Just last week Tikkun received advice from some leading African American progressives that in their community Tikkun was losing credibility by being so outspoken in critiquing Obama, given the widespread perception in that community that attacks on Obama from whatever corner are really expressions of covert racism. Nor have those who have lost their homes to escalating interest rates on mortgage loans or those who have lost their jobs while the money that could have saved them has poured into the coffers of the rich managed to assemble on the streets of our country to demonstrate their outrage.

So when developing a strategy, one must take into account the emotional temper of Americans today including their continued willingness to support the Democratic Party, in no small part because of a perception that had Nader not run in 2000 there would never have been a Bush presidency or a war in Iraq or the irresponsible economic policies that led to the economic meltdown.

So those of us who wish to stop the growing corporate dominance of the world and reverse the destruction of the environmental destruction of the planet and the erosion of human relationships and ethical values in our society that is labeled “the globalization of capitalism” but which I prefer to call “the globalization of selfishness,” need to develop smart strategies to change the consciousness of Americans.

I believe that there are three elements to such a strategy:

Crossposted from The Fearless Heart.

On Tuesday morning I had the unusual opportunity to offer coaching and support to two women, one from Egypt and one from Sudan, who are heading a unique program in cultural competence for medical students in one of the Persian Gulf Emirates. Across cultural differences (I am, after all, from Israel), without any training in NVC [Nonviolent Communication], we connected, and they learned how they could change outcomes by imagining from the inside the experience of people with whom they were in conflict.

Why were they here? The students in the program they teach are generally open and receptive. But the doctors in the hospital, themselves from many countries, have been consistently expressing doubt and impatience towards the concept of cultural competence, even towards the idea of medical interpreters being present when there is a language barrier with the patient. What could they do, these women wondered, so that their students could get support when they are doing medical rotations at the hospital?

Can Conflict Be Transformed into Partnership?

I invited the head of the program to enter the shoes of a doctor, to say what they have heard them say so many times, and together to understand what their experience is. They learned, with astonishment, how different it would be for the doctors if they tried to form a partnership with them in addressing concerns rather than trying to convince them that the program is essential. We learned that the doctors are struggling with an immense load of patients who are often migrant workers and can’t see how they could take the time to engage in understanding the patients beyond just figuring out the symptoms and reach a diagnosis.

Abortion is a difficult subject. It has divided our nation for many years. It requires us to think about difficult questions. When does life begin? To whom is the state primarily responsible, the woman who is its citizen or to her unborn child? How do we balance our moral obligations to both? What is the role of believers in the respect and the protection of both the mother and child?

“The future of God depends on the future of secularism,” writes Bruce Ledewitz in the March/April 2010 issue of Tikkun.

Ledewitz is a secularist but not of the Hitchens/Dawkins variety. On his blog Ledewitz says of this Tikkun issue:

Almost all of the contributors to the magazine commenting on the theme of God seem to share [Rabbi Arthur] Green’s framework: science first and religion adapts. Hans Kung, Aryeh Cohen and Zaid Shakir are exceptions…

First, I’m in the same boat as most of the others, but I don’t call it religion. I call it Hallowed Secularism. Thus, you don’t have to join organized religion. Actually, I can’t join organized religion and I don’t understand how others manage to do so.

Second, and more significant, I argue in my recent manuscript, Higher Law in the Public Square, that if God can mean what these writers mean by God, then In God We Trust does not violate the Establishment Clause.

Join us tomorrow, Monday, March 8, when Bruce Ledewitz will be my guest on the Tikkun Phone Forum at 6 pm Pacific time, 9 pm Eastern time.

I was happy to see AlterNet post this significant debate as one of their lead articles today, under the title “Should Progressives Give Up on Obama? Chris Hedges vs. Rabbi Lerner.” Common Dreams posts Michael’s piece here.

As I write this there are 68 comments on the AlterNet site, and 318 on Common Dreams! If you are used to our comments culture here on Tikkun Daily you may be put off by the scathing tones of many of the comments, but persevere and there are well-made points. At least some people are wrestling with the ideas. (With one exception the quotes here are from AlterNet.) One writes:

I applaud both Hedges and Lerner for their thoughts and efforts to grapple with the serious challenges of framing our discourse around the urgent need to frame our shared goals for this society in a manner that represents the best of what we can be. Reading both pieces requires a little time and a lot of reflection and I hope that those who comment have done both.

Whether people’s points are well-made or not, you get the pulse of the Left, and much of it is indeed very angry. This is representative of many:

Some of you Tikkun-ers have told me from time to time: “Share with us about the people who inspire from your context in Brazil.”

Fair enough. I’ve already posted a link to one other video of my dear Brazilian friend, Claudio Oliver. But I couldn’t resist posting another: a video interview that took place earlier this week in Australia. This video continues the same line of reflection regarding poverty, friendship, and the presence/action of the local Christian communities.

To set the stage, I’ll just mention 2 key themes:

On February 24, Rev. Paul Raushenbush issued a call for articles entitled “Dear Religious (and Sane) America” to inaugurate the launch of the Huffington Post’s new religion section. According to the article,

HuffPost Religion is dedicated to providing a provocative, respectful, and hopefully productive forum for addressing the ways in which religion intersects our personal, communal, national and international life. HuffPost Religion will demonstrate the vibrant diversity of religious traditions, perspectives and experiences that exist alongside and inform one another in America and throughout the world.

Huffington is clearly trying to expand its reach and become one of the big players in religion media, much as it already has in politics, popular culture, and even business. Based on initial responses to the section, it appears to be well on its way.

Students, workers, grade school teachers, and professors are marching in defense of public education throughout the country today, with more than 100 events taking place in 32 different states.

Hundreds of people gathered at the state capitol in Sacramento this morning to call on the state legislature to reverse the budget cuts and layoffs that are undermining California’s elementary schools and public universities alike.

Protesters gather March 4, 2010, in Sacramento. Photo by Randy Pench of the Sacramento Bee.

One of my biggest passions is finding ways to make what I do teachable, especially in the area of empathic presence. It’s not only a passion, but a necessity. Our times, more than ever, require empathy to become widely accessible to people. I want to find a way to replicate what I do, to build capacity for the work necessary to create a world that works for all. Could this blog be a way to do that?

Recently, talk of empathy is increasing. But the how of empathy is still missing. People are hungry for this knowledge, and yet it’s so elusive. How can one teach about empathic presence? Can empathy really be broken down and learned? I want to say: YES! Empathy is core to what makes us human. When we bring together our mind, heart, body, and imagination; when we can focus all our attention and become a witness to another’s humanity, we enter the empathic space, and in some small measure life changes. How can we cultivate this capacity?

Many of the specific failures highlighted by the article I linked to Tuesday by Chris Hedges criticizing the performance of the Obama Administration are legitimate points. But the way Hedges’s positions are stated, and the conclusions drawn from them are not the path of spiritual progressives, in my view. There was too much anger in his statement overshadowing our spiritual progressive commitment to compassion and to a spirit of generosity toward others with whose politics we disagree. And not enough sympathy for the problems anyone would face trying to get elected as President and to repair the damage of the past 30 years.

I have great respect for Chris Hedges, as one of the very few people who was a respected journalist at the New York Times and subsequently left the Times in protest of the way they ignored those of us in the anti-war movement who were warning about the lies of the Bush Administration and opposing the use of violence to achieve US ends in the Middle East, and because I am grateful that he has written a brilliant article in Tikkun on the Obama Brand and has accepted our invite to speak at our conference in D.C.

Yet in this post I want to state places where I disagree with Hedges article, although I do at first affirm some things that are right about Hedges’ position even while I don’t affirm the tone and style of his communication (which, to be fair to him, was written for a different venue and not at all like the more nuanced pieces he has put into Tikkun magazine). I hope you read this through to the end, even while grumbling that it is too long (I know, but here is a basic truth about communication: if you are referencing ideas that are already popular in the culture, you can do so with a short slogan; but if you are trying to introduce new ideas that do not resonate with the “established wisdom” or “common sense” of the culture, it often takes a nuanced discussion that is longer — and hence the nuanced position may feel too long to people who have been accustomed to the dumbing down of popular discourse by the media and the politicians.)

Despite what Chris Hedges wrote, I have met Obama personally and privately on several occasions and do not believe he is a liar or a conscious manipulator. I do not agree with the decisions he has made since he won the Democratic nomination for President, and particularly after he became President, and I’ve gone out of my way to communicate in a clear, firm way those criticisms, and to do so in a positive language that showed exactly what he could do to change his approach.

I have posted the rest of this long statement on our Current Thinking site along with Hedges’s article, many of your responses to that article and your responses to this one of mine (which I emailed out to our list before posting here), so please check them all out there.

Where we get our fuel from for being our truest selves and for remaking the world — which are two sides of one coin in my worldview — is always a question for me. I meet someone who is creative, or who struggles on over decades to care for some part of the world, and I want to know: what has kept you going, what feeds your spirit? They may be successful at their struggle and they may be well loved, or they may be a burr in others’ flesh and feel that their success is way too little and unappreciated: or both of these! But how have they not burned out? How do they keep giving?

We profiled Barbara Bash on this blog and on our art gallery a while back. Here’s a different side to her, from her “visual blog” True Nature. I recognize this experience of hers so well: one day’s answer to the questions above. I find a good deal to think about in how her day developed, and in the fact that she kept at her work in the absence of inspiration. I have not been having an easy week or two myself, and thank her for lightening my morning with this.

A Day at the Museum

By Barbara Bash
After a week of snowstorms
I head into New York City and the Metropolitan Museum
to see what draws me in and out . . .

I expect to feel my delight and curiosity.
Instead I stagger through the halls, overwhelmed and discouraged.
The buddhas and bodhisattvas do not comfort me.
The Egyptians seem preoccupied with death.
All the people wandering around appear to have attention deficit disorder -
but it’s really me that has it !

Finally I get to the “primitives” – Oceania, Africa, Pre-Colombian -
and I painfully coax my pencil to the page . . .

I lived in Naples, FL for over eight years and never realized that there were human slaves toiling in the agricultural fields less than 45 minutes away. This is the case for much of the population of Naples, one of the wealthiest towns in America and the only city in the world that has two Ritz Carltons in it — the beach and golf resorts. Furthermore, it is the case for much of America. While the trendy green movement has led us to scrutinize trans fats and demand hybrid cars we haven’t paid enough attention to where our food comes from.

When I was 21 years old I visited Immokalee for the first time and began volunteering with a local organization that provided much needed goods and services to the community. I saw first hand the living conditions that many farm workers live in. Numerous families will often share one trailer home in terrible conditions and pay high rents due to greedy landlords and fear of being deported. I formed relationships with residents, listened to their stories and met people who had been slaves. I learned about the working conditions and injustice in the fields. But my education took a few years and very well may not have ever happened had I not visited Immokalee one day with my mother.

That’s why the latest project from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers is an important contribution to our understanding and awareness of food justice issues. After many successful campaigns to reform the agricultural industry resulted in a victories over some of the largest fast food giants-Taco Bell, McDonalds and Burger King the CIW has now launched a traveling modern day slavery museum. Perhaps with efforts like this more people will grow up in Naples knowing about how issues of justice are related to our food. Barry Estabrook recently visited the museum and wrote about it for the Atlantic Monthly:

Since the mid-1990s, more than 1,000 slaves have been freed in at least six cases in Florida…

Fittingly, the museum is housed in a 24-foot box truck once used to haul produce. The truck is a replica of one in which several men were kept locked up for as long as two and a half years until the slavery ring that held them was broken in 2007. They slept in the truck, urinated and defecated in one corner, and were driven in the truck daily to fields where they were forced to pick tomatoes, often for no pay. Some of the men who were imprisoned acted as “consultants” on the project to assure authenticity. In late 2008, several members of a family were sentenced to jail terms in the case.

Growing up I believed that you could get either love OR respect in life, but not both. This was my mother’s understanding of the way the world worked — one she taught me from day one — and maybe it was true for her or even for women of her generation. But over the years, I’ve discovered that without respect, love is a hollow sweetness, and that without love, respect can result in a distance that undoes its best intentions.

These insights came back to me Sunday at First Unitarian Society in Madison as I listened to our associate minister Karen Gustavson offer one of her best sermons ever. It was well-crafted, contained great stories and great intelligence, but I disagreed completely with what she had to say. The sermon was also about a topic that I care about with every cell in my body — about our need to love and care for the Earth. And so I feel compelled to present a different viewpoint.

We in the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) are considering changes in the language of our “Principles and Purposes,” the statements that guide our work together as an association of free, but interdependent congregations. Karen was responding on Sunday to the rewording of the seventh principle, a change that would substitute the word reverence for the word respect in the phrase “we covenant to honor and uphold … respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.” She made an effective appeal for retaining the original language –respect — because she believes that to revere something implies a certain passivity — true for our fundamentalist brethren, but not for me and other people on the left hand of God — while respect indicates an active response. Obviously, this is not my experience.

What all Unitarian Universalists want in this rewrite of the seventh principle is language that reflects care for the Earth as a religious imperative, not an optional activity.

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the American pediatrician whose 1946 book "Baby and Child Care" is one of the biggest best sellers of all time, is arrested at a protest against the Vietnam War in Washington on May 16, 1972.

“Just don’t get arrested,” my mother repeatedly warned me. “You might hurt your career as a doctor.” She had lived through the McCarthy era and knew how easily careers ended. Heeding her words, I kept a low profile at anti-Vietnam war demonstrations.

In 1981 I finished medical school and began my training in Pediatrics. I found myself in what seemed like another war. I was a “private,” a subordinate to the hospital equivalents of lieutenants, colonels and generals. We fought childhood cancer and meningitis, premature birth and AIDS. I ascended the ranks, from the lowly intern to resident. At the time, all residents were subjected to repeated hits from “friendly fire”: enduring targeted questioning from superiors, designed to humiliate us by exposing our abysmal lack of medical knowledge before our colleagues. After three years of this teaching method, it took me awhile to recover from my own PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

While living through this training, I’d come home exhausted to stare at the TV and take in the evening news. At the time, there was a lot of bad news coming from El Salvador. I once watched in horror as a student from the University of San Salvador was shot outside his classroom by military police. The young man moaned in anguish as his blood flooded onto the linoleum floor, and then he grew still.

I read about the four missing North American churchwomen, who had put themselves in harm’s way simply by helping others. Their bullet-ridden bodies had been discovered buried near the San Salvador airport. It seemed my mother was right about taking risks, and one could lose even more than a medical license.

Listening to Republican rhetoric on healthcare reform legislation, one would think the Democratic leadership in Congress and President Obama were about to commit extreme violence upon the people of the United States. According to Republicans, “the American people” do not want healthcare reform as crafted by the bills that have already passed both houses of Congress. The Republican refrain is we ought to start over. In the weekly Republican address, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma said Democrats intend to use a “procedural trick” to “ram through” healthcare reform legislation.

Chris Hedges’ piece on Truthdig yesterday deserves to be widely read. He writes:

Chris Hedges. Flickr/Cheryl Biren

We owe Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney an apology. They were right about Barack Obama. They were right about the corporate state. They had the courage of their convictions and they stood fast despite wholesale defections and ridicule by liberals and progressives….

The illegal wars and occupations, the largest transference of wealth upward in American history and the egregious assault on civil liberties, all begun under George W. Bush, raise only a flicker of tepid protest from liberals when propagated by the Democrats. Liberals, unlike the right wing, are emotionally disabled. They appear not to feel. The tea party protesters, the myopic supporters of Sarah Palin, the veterans signing up for Oath Keepers and the myriad of armed patriot groups have swept into their ranks legions of disenfranchised workers, angry libertarians, John Birchers and many who, until now, were never politically active. They articulate a legitimate rage. Yet liberals continue to speak in the bloodless language of issues and policies, and leave emotion and anger to the protofascists….

It is time to walk out on the Democrats. It is time to back alternative third-party candidates and grass-roots movements, no matter how marginal such support may be.

The rest is here. My recommending the article is not meant to be an endorsement of Chris’s position any more than our circulation of other articles is meant as an endorsement of them.

Image courtesy of FlickrCC/janinsanfran.

Steffie Woolhandler’s “A faulty prescription for reform” and John Nichols’s “The Missing Voices at the Healthcare Summit” both show why it’s a huge mistake to be “realistic” in reforming the health care system.

In order to be realistic, President Obama and the Democratic leadership of the House and Senate refused to give any attention to a “Medicare for Everyone” approach — the only approach that could actually solve some of the major problems facing health care in the United States. As long as our health care is not about “care” but about profits, there is little chance of arriving at a health care system that will actually serve the needs of Americans. This was the same mistake made by President Clinton in his approach, and it is fast becoming a major reason why Democrats may lose their congressional majority in 2010: people don’t trust a government whose interventions often seem more oriented toward the needs of corporations than the needs of ordinary American citizens, and the only force that is really articulating the resentment people feel at having to pay more and more taxes to fund programs that largely serve corporate power is the anti-government right wing. We need to build a counter-force to that, one which is truly understanding of why people would be opposed to government spending when it is not serving their interests, and the health care plan now being supported by Obama is likely to intensify this right-wing reactionary response to a real problem: the problem of corporate greed and the profit motive distorting medicine and making health about profits not about caring.