Revised version, June 1:

We regret and deplore the killings which took place as Israeli troops, in defiance of international law, boarded and assaulted, wounded many and killed some of the participants in a flotilla seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza (itself a morally outrageous policy) to bring humanitarian aid. We ask all people of peace to participate in memorials for those peace activists who have been killed (and we call upon all synagogues around the world to say Kaddish for those people at their Shabbat services this coming weekend), and for prayer for the speedy recovery of all those wounded in this attack (mostly peace activists, but also the Israeli soldiers who boarded the boats with violence).

We invite all peace-loving people to attend a public memorial for those who died in this assault in Lafayette Park opposite the White House on Sunday, June 13, at 11 am – 2 pm, sponsored by Tikkun, the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and many other groups, and which will include a larger consideration of U.S. policies. Memorial prayers and prayers for healing will be said at 1 pm.

George Stephanopoulos is at it again.

The earth is bleeding, 5,000 feet below
the water’s surface of
the Gulf of Mexico,
an opened artery flowing, and
without the surgeon’s deft suture,
mortally wounded

While America wakes to
Sunday morning “This Week,”
where it’s all about PR,
who looks good and who
looks bad in Washington,
what we should think about the
ineffectual response, wasting time
talking about the time wasted and
how politicians could look better.

I change channels and hear
reporters joke
there’s no one to interview,
because not enough
sorry enough looking
real people have yet been affected, so
they have only the pelicans to poll,
never considering they might be
too tarred to respond;
We no longer need canaries.

Planet earth is in the emergency room,
and we have no life support.

George ends with photos
of fallen soldiers, and “Oh-My-God”
music— the cue to honor,
as we ponder the message
over coffee and cereal.
Next programming is

Nascar, with its siphoning zip of engines
converting Mother-blood to exhaust
in defiant euphoria,
speeding in circles,
cheering through the sheer waste.

Part 1 of this mini-series was posted here, and part 2 here.

Many people find it challenging, almost impossible, to imagine asking for what they want in their workplace. This is especially true if they have little access to formal power within the organization. I plan to come back to the topic of power, including within organizations, in the near future. For now, I want to focus on fundamental principles that can help you in lining up resources for yourself in the workplace regardless of where you are in the organization.

Make the “Why” Clear and Relevant
By and large, the kind of requests we make in the workplace are related to our being able to work well within the environment in which we find ourselves. This will likely be either a direct connection (e.g. wanting to buy a piece of software that would make my work more effective) or an indirect connection (e.g. I want to sit in a different office where I am not so agitated about the conversations around me, which would help me feel better and hence focus and be productive).

A clear and simple principle follows from this clarity. Connecting our requests to organizational goals, including your ability to do your job is likely to increase the chances of someone saying “yes” to your request. It’s easier to hear a request when its underlying purpose is clear and connected to goals that are important to the person receiving these requests. This is especially true if the person to whom you are directing the request is in a position of authority in relation to you. If the link is not obvious, make it explicit.

What do Obama’s three greatest failures — health care, Afghanistan and the oil spill — all have in common? Each one was preceded by an elaborate attempt on Obama’s part to portray his decisions in non-partisan, quasi-scientific and technical terms. Each one was presented as seizing a middle-ground between unreasonable partisans on the two extremes. Of all of the masks worn by this carefully constructed persona, that of the man of reason is the most prominent. Let us look at how it works.

At least since the New Deal, progressives argued for health care as a universal right. They did not want to live in a world where their fellow citizens, or even their fellow human beings, died because they didn’t have access to doctors or medicine. Obama dropped this emphasis for one that foregrounded cost-cutting. According to him, evidence-based scientific research would be used to mandate medical decisions. The possibility that raising the level of the country’s health might cost money, not save money, was never directly considered.

Obama’s first expansion of the Afghan War occurred only a few weeks after taking office, but his second large-scale expansion was preceded by an elaborately choreographed set of seminars in which all the different options were supposedly considered. Those who still believe that this was anything more than a charade have to tell the rest of us what Obama learned from his seminars, i.e., in what way his post-seminar understanding of “the good war,” as he calls Afghanistan, differs.

As to the oil spill, Obama announced his support for offshore drilling on March 10, unfortunate timing for him as the BP spill occurred a few weeks later. In his announcement he said he would provide “order and certainty to offshore exploration and development … ensuring we are drilling in the right ways and the right places.” As to spills, he promised we would “employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration…. And we’ll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence.”
Once again, we got the message: the non-Bush, the thoughtful ratiocinator.

The dead do not need us.  They do not need our visits to their gravesites where flesh and bone feed the earth.  They do not need our flags, flowers, work of grave maintenance or the libation of our tears. They do not need our pilgrimage to their mausoleum or to the place where we scattered their ashes.

The dead do not need us.  They do not need our war movie marathons, super sale days, parades, picnics, concerts, fireworks or a moment of silence at 3 pm.

“Hey, look at this!” I shouted to my husband, early one morning a few weeks ago. “Ian’s on the front page of the Huffington Post!”

Ian is my oldest brother. According to family lore, he went to school in France as an exchange student at 16. He then entered Friends World College where, after listing his interests as French, totalitarian government and oceanography, he was dispatched to Haiti on a fishing boat. He earned graduate degrees in oceanography in Oslo, Norway and then spent an indeterminate amount of time building fish hatcheries throughout the third world, traveling, or both. He is fluent in English, Creole, French, northern and southern Norwegian and Italian. Eventually, he became an expert in the impacts of oil on Gulf ecosystems.

“He says BP is lying about the size of the spill,” I said as Richard brought me my coffee.

My friend Sabuhi just wrote to let me know about the horrible attacks against two Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat mosques in Lahore Pakistan.

Imagine a woman who has been in an abusive marriage for so long that she no longer knows that she is in one. Her husband defines the world for her. She is on her knees all the time, anticipating his wishes, giving him what ever she has, telling him what he wants to hear, working overtime to please him. Her world is grey, depressing, anxiety-ridden and dark. She has forgotten the dreams of her childhood, and she doesn’t know there is an alternative.

One day she meets someone who offers hope – a minister, a rabbi, a therapist, a friend. Suddenly everything brightens and it seems that she can find a way out. She will leave her husband, or transform the relationship. One way or another she will regain her sense of self. But then it doesn’t happen. The person who was expected to help her tells her that there isn’t much that can be done, and besides he or she has already done so very much for her. That’s the way the world is, she is told. You can’t really change things that much.

The American people today, a year and a half after electing Obama, are in the position of this woman. A concentrated claque of banks, insurance companies, corporations, and the Pentagon dominates their entire world. For two thirds of a century, after winning their great victory in World War Two, they have known nothing but war. They have been told, and they believe, that they live in a world overgrown with enemies of their “interests,” meaning the interests of their rulers. For most of that time, the enemy was an ill-defined “communist conspiracy,” a catch-all phrase that included anti-colonial nationalists, pan-Arabs, Latin American state-builders, and simply those who criticized America. Today there is scarcely a nation in the world in which they have not placed land mines, barbed wire, tanks, and stands of explosives; there is no sea they have not polluted with blustering, oil-dripping ships; no quartile of near space is not surfeited with their satellites; no half-formed nation they have not transformed into their serf.

With the fate of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell about to fall into the hands of the Senate, where Republican opposition to gays serving in the military is fierce, Democrats and a few Republicans may want to pay attention to the future by listening to this youngster who represents a growing intolerance for discrimination! Read more to watch the video and then I’ll share a few very personal thoughts about gays serving in the military (they are, they should be allowed to, and they shouldn’t have to suffer discrimination based on their sexual orientation).

Progressives have been blessed in the past two years with three significant opportunities to change the fundamentals of American society. We’ve already blown the first and are missing the second and third.

The first, of course, was the economic meltdown. What a moment that could have been for progressives in Congress or the White House to challenge the ideology of “leave it to the marketplace” or “leave it to the states” to work things out. Imagine if President Obama had told Wall Street and the Republicans, “OK, lets test your theories right now — lets just let the marketplace work its wonders as the banks fail.” And had they pleaded for relief, it should have been given on condition that they enthusiastically and simultaneously back and help implement a single payer health care plan, the creation of a national bank to fund no-interest loans to people on the verge of losing their homes from deceptive mortgage loan offers and to fund socially useful and environmentally sound new projects to offset unemployment, the funding of a massive new WPA-style full employment program to make sure that everyone who wants to work can and can use their talents in ways that are societally useful, and to encourage small businesses, and the creation of a whole new set of laws restricting banking and investment company operations to make them respond to the needs of the society and not just to the profit motivations of their investors. Well, that chance was blown.

BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) is the increasing popular weapon of choice amongst many of us who oppose the actions and positions of the current Israeli government. It is also the Israeli weapon of choice against Gaza, though if pushed they resort to more direct weapons. At the heart of the debate over BDS lies the question of whether it is right to call for a boycott of Israel of when so many other countries do so many worse things. Some BDS opponents claim that call is the demon of anti-Semitism rearing its subtly disguised head. But as Hamlet noted, “Use every man after his dessert, and who should ‘scape whipping?” If I were to boycott every country that committed human rights abuses, I fear I’d have to walk naked for lack of a source of moral clothing. So do I then boycott none? How do I decide?

Every night since the attack on my home by right-wing Zionists, I’ve been saying a prayer of forgiveness for them. While the political meaning of that act, and of the demeaning of critics of Israel, will be explored more fully in the July/August issue of Tikkun, on the spiritual level it is very important to not let negativity, even terrorism or violence, get the upper hand by bringing us down to the same level of anger or hatred that motivates those who act violently or those who demean and attempt to delegitimate the critics of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Cuatro master Roberto Fuentes. Photo: flickr/superartista

Roberto died at High Valley, our center, after a long illness. During his last weeks, his friends Karen and David cared for him there, joined by his mother Luisa from Venezuela. Until her recent move to a nursing home, Karen and David shared a house with my mother-in-law Olga, also from Venezuela. Olga’s last years at home coincided with the years Roberto, a musician from New York, stayed at High Valley frequently. Whenever he visited, he played Venezuelan folksongs on his Cuatro for Olga. In her nineties and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Olga knew all the words and sang along, tapping her feet to the rhythm. Olga and Roberto were more than compatriots. They came from the same island, Margarita, and spoke the same dialect. With his music, Roberto restored Olga’s memory of her earliest years.

It had gone on for months… starting with name-calling, then shoves on the stairwell – tripping in the cafeteria – punches in the hallway, then a brick… Decades ago that was my nightmare Junior High School life and children continue to suffer this kind of abuse every day across our country. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Tolerance.org wants to provide teachers and administrators with new tools to help curb anti-gay and other bullying. Being a huge fan of what Tolerance.org does, I wanted people to know about it.

I was taken with this email from the PICO network. PICO is a organization that does Saul Alinsky-type community organizing with congregations, and has done a great deal of lobyying for adequate political responses to help people hurt by the mortgage crisis, by our health care system (that should really be “health” “care” “system” as all three words are inaccurate) and many other issues. Here in this email is one piece of news of ordinary people in a congregation working together and making an impact relevant to BP and the Gulf. I was intrigued to find that the action asked is to pray, and not just to pray but to sign a petition promising to pray, so that the activists on this issue will be able to show the support they are getting from prayers (which, as Elizabeth Cunningham noted here last week in Becoming A Prayer is a noun that can describe the person praying as well as the words prayed). I am posting it to celebrate their success and to note this web-based example of the public use of prayer, which has been used for political causes, good and bad, down through the millennia:

Dear Friend,
Last week, a group of Vietnamese-American and African-American residents from my church — Mary Queen of Viet Nam, a member of PICO affiliate Micah Project in New Orleans — won an important victory against BP and other oil and gas companies.
Now we need your help as we continue to oppose unjust corporate practices that are harming families throughout our region. We are asking you to commit to pray for the families in the Gulf Coast Region today.
As we do our part in this fight, we need to know that our brothers and sisters around the country are supporting us in prayer. Sign our “Prayer Petition” today.

Thinking about BPs response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we hear one of its representatives say: “Alternatives are currently being progressed.”  This is what Doug Suttles, Chief Operation Officer of the Exploration and Production Division of BP told Matt Lauer on the Today Show on Monday, May 24.  A more straight forward response would be:  “We do not know how to fix it.” The federal government officials should say the same thing.  Instead we get awkward statements in the passive voice and talk about the federal government applying more pressure to BP.  Until we have better answers, we ought to stop off-shore drilling.

“]

Robin Hood and Marian from the new movie [which imagines a nice connection between Robin Hood and the Magna Carta--something all Brits should be proud of

Note: I wrote and posted this too fast and so am making visible tweaks (in crossings out and the square brackets) on an ongoing basis! This is a hugely loaded topic and it’s hard to be clear about what I mean, but the process of doing so itself is part of what blogging is about.

Does that headline give you a twinge? We (whether of European origin or not) should all get over that reaction — in a progressive way, not a rightwing way. [Second thoughts: don't say what "we" should do on this! The twinge is inevitable. People of European origin have created so much havoc and been so arrogant about their heritage it's a major issue how they can find a genuine kind of pride in the good parts of that heritage. But if they don't find how to do so in ways that nonEuropean people can celebrate with them--in the way that we all should be able to celebrate the best of each other's heritages while acknowledging the worst--then the only people offering European pride or "white pride" will be the right wing, which will continue to be disastrous.]

The NYT reports today that the leadership of France’s racist far right National Front party is devolving from 81-year-old Jean-Marie Le Pen to his youngest daughter, Marine Le Pen, 41. She is trying to go more mainstream and to distance herself from her father’s anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial, views she does not apparently share. She is looking to appeal to “a more traditional voter, hurt by globalization and industrial decline.” Muslims worry her more than Jews.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has tried to absorb the National Front’s voters as the single candidate of the right, taking tough stands against the full facial veil, for instance, and restricting immigration. In this way, said Simon Serfaty, a European scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, “the National Front corrupts the larger parties” and forces them rightward.

Scapegoats change, the world goes on as usual. Nothing here surprises me much but I want to call out this comment that Marine Le Pen makes in the article.

“There has been a withdrawal into non-French identities because we sapped French nationality of its content,” she said. “So how can someone be proud? We spend all our lives saying, ‘We are bastards, colonizers, slavery promoters.’”

I feel strongly that the Left has not taken this issue seriously enough [of how to celebrate what is good in European history while giving full attention to what is bad in it]. I loved it that in the first year I was at Tikkun Michael Lerner decided to put out an issue with “Impeach Bush & Cheney” on the cover along with “Celebrating the Good in America.” The latter article, titled Inter-Dependence Day Celebration encouraged Americans to hold alternative July 4 celebrations that would focus on all the reasons we have to be proud as Americans “while acknowledging our interdependence with all people on the planet.” In 1976 Michael and a colleague had tried hard to hold a leftwing celebration of all the people’s victories in US history but simply couldn’t get enough people to join in.

The failure to do this opens up a huge vacuum that rightwing parties can fill. “If White men feel that their concerns are insignificant, they may react with a backlash.” So writes Cherie Brown, of the National Coalition Building Institute, an international leadership training organization, who has written many pieces for Tikkun. She tells a great story about a workshop she held at a US college:

Why is receiving feedback challenging? Whenever any one of us gives feedback that is tainted with criticism, judgment, or our personal upset, we create a situation that requires a lot more capacity and skill from the person who receives our feedback. So, a big part of why receiving feedback is so challenging is because so few people around us know how to give feedback. But, if we wait for others to offer us usable, digestible, manageable feedback, we will not likely receive sufficient feedback for our growth and learning.

The alternative is to stretch our inner muscles, seek feedback, and grow in our capacity to fish the pearl that’s in what may otherwise be someone else wanting to be heard for how upset and angry they are with us. How do we do that, and how do we grow in our capacity to do that?

The more self-acceptance we have, the easier it is to hear feedback, because we can relax into ourselves and receive it as information rather than confirmation that there is something wrong with us.

Working towards receiving feedback also invites us to listen empathically to others. What is the essence of what they are saying? Can you hear an observation even if it’s not fully stated, or ask for one? Can you reach for understanding why this is important to the person giving feedback even if the words are focused entirely on you? Can you fill in the gaps about what strategies you might employ for addressing the issues raised even if the other person has no suggestions?

If you want to grow in this arena, here are three specific suggestions:

Can homodoxuals and heterodoxuals find a way to get along, sit in the same pew, or is schism the only answer? My friend, the Rev. Jim Burklo, just sent me his latest “Musings” post from the Center for Progressive Christianity, and I immediately knew I had to share it (with his permission of course), with all of you!

We usually think of praying as something we do, a prayer as something we say or perhaps read, aloud or silently. But if a singer is one who sings, a writer one who writes, a dancer one who dances, and so forth, we could say that a prayer is one who prays. If we pray, we are prayers.

The daughter of an Episcopal priest, I grew up with the sonorous, sometimes terrifying language of The 1928 Book of Common Prayer. From the General Confession this phrase has always stayed with me. “We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickednesses.” (I still love that second plural.)

Quaker Meeting was my first experience of silent corporate prayer. In what I called “the womb of silence” different images of the divine emerged, especially feminine ones. In time, longing for music and ritual led me out of Quaker Meeting to form a non-institutional, earth-centered community. At length I also became an ordained interfaith minister.

Here are some things I am learning about praying/being a prayer:

If you pray for someone (or something), prepare to be part of the answer.