… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. — Charles Dickens

As Van Jones said, MLK's great speech was not titled "I Have A Complaint."

There’s still time to work phone banks this weekend for our preferred candidates. But are you going to support the Democrats, the Greens or another outsider party? And whoever wins this week, how do we build hope and momentum for creating a Caring Society going forward? There was another fine jeremiad by Chris Hedges on Truthdig this week doing his best, incidentally, to persuade you not to vote Democrat. The opening paragraph:

The lunatic fringe of the Republican Party, which looks set to make sweeping gains in the midterm elections, is the direct result of a collapse of liberalism. It is the product of bankrupt liberal institutions, including the press, the church, universities, labor unions, the arts and the Democratic Party. The legitimate rage being expressed by disenfranchised workers toward the college-educated liberal elite, who abetted or did nothing to halt the corporate assault on the poor and the working class of the last 30 years, is not misplaced. The liberal class is guilty. The liberal class, which continues to speak in the prim and obsolete language of policies and issues, refused to act. It failed to defend traditional liberal values during the long night of corporate assault in exchange for its position of privilege and comfort in the corporate state. The virulent right-wing backlash we now experience is an expression of the liberal class’ flagrant betrayal of the citizenry.

Those of our readers who don’t like Eli Zaretsky’s excoriations of Obama on Tikkun Daily won’t like Hedges’ writing either. Both are saying things about the defeat of liberalism by corporate hegemony that I imagine middle of the road historians in a hundred years, if there are any, will find fair comment about this era. The question is, though, how we respond when we are in the middle of it. How do we build our own sense of hope and agency?

Gay-friendly church (photo by Drama Queen)

Last October, retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote a manifesto declaring his unwillingness to keep publicly debating the issue of LGBT inclusion with conservatives who oppose inclusion on religious grounds. The manifesto is strong, clear, and bold. LGBT people of faith should be grateful to have (to have had?) such a powerful ally on our side.

But I’m not writing to Bishop Spong. I am writing to the rest of us, for whom there is no rest. We who continue to labor in the field for a harvest of LGBT religious inclusion need our own manifesto, especially those of us who are ourselves LGBT. We need some stirring words as we confront opportunities to clarify our position, to witness to our basic humanity, and to demonstrate empirically that faith informs our life as strongly as it informs the lives of those who witness against us. Here are a few words – perhaps not stirring, but intended as a small start, one that can be built upon by many others:

Last night, Jon Stewart snagged an exclusive interview with President Barack Obama on filibuster reform which the President supports. A few weeks ago, I visited Washington and dropped in on my New Mexico Congressional delegation. Senator Tom Udall shared his thoughts on The Constitutional Option, a rules change he is proposing at the beginning of the next Congress to reform filibuster abuse. My exclusive video interview of Senator Udall on filibuster and health care reform is posted below.

Beautiful commencement address here by Cornel West, at Spelman College in 2009. Just look at the faces of the young women and how inspired they are.

My thanks to Tikkun Daily blogger Be Scofield for this. His own website, God Bless The Whole World, “features hundreds of videos, audio files, articles and courses on social justice, nonviolence, spirituality, activism, counter oppression, environmentalism and self care.”

In case you haven’t been following the Yes Men’s  latest expose of corporate misinformation check out their recent press releases. The first one was on October 19:

Massive Chevron Ad Campaign Derailed, Media Slapstick Follows

News outlets, citizens duped by web of deceit – but whose?

A day-long comedy of errors began Monday morning when the Yes Men, supported by Rainforest Action Network and Amazon Watch, pre-empted Chevron’s enormous new “We Agree” ad campaign with a satirical version of their own. The activists’ version highlights Chevron’s environmental and social abuses – the same abuses they say Chevron is attempting to “greenwash.”

“Chevron’s super-expensive fake street art is a cynical attempt to gloss over the human rights abuses and environmental degradation that is the legacy of Chevron’s operations in Ecuador, Nigeria, Burma and throughout the world,” said Ginger Cassady, a campaigner at Rainforest Action Network. “They must think we’re stupid.”

“They say we’re ‘interrupting the dialogue,’” said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men, referring to Chevron’s terse condemnation. “What dialogue? Chevron’s ad campaign is an insulting, confusing monologue – with many tens of millions of dollars behind it.”

The rest is here. And here’s their latest:

A tribute to John Lennon, in the wake of these turbulent political times

I hope you like this little web short tribute from the BBC to one of my favorite musicians — John Lennon, z’l (“z’l” stands for zichrono livracha, which is Hebrew for “may his or her memory be a blessing.”) The video is cute and uplifting. Have you heard Lennon’s last few albums, when it was just him, or him and Yoko? They are really amazing.

2010 Elections

Some key words taken from Obama's inaugural address.

Get ready for a massive two-year indoctrination from mass media and the “realists” in both major political parties as they confidently proclaim that the Dems lost badly because Obama proved “too radical” for the American public. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a different perspective, please read our analysis of the election dynamic.

In the past few weeks the president took two more actions that support our analysis: (1) he refused the plea of Senator Reid and other congressional Democrats to establish a freeze on mortgage foreclosures pending an investigation of the illegal activities of many of the banks and companies involved in throwing people out of their homes and (2) the Obama administration is developing a bill that would allow the government to wiretap emails and other electronic communications, which would extend the Bush-era expansion of government spying. Click here to read more about the Obama administration and wiretapping. Also refer to this New York Times editorial, published on Monday, October 25, which comments on the shabby human rights record the Obama administration has developed. According to the editorialist, “It can be hard to distinguish between the Bush administration and the Obama administration when it comes to detainee policy.” This is not an administration that is too left or too radical or even too liberal.

As the United States prepares for midterm elections (a phrase that recalls midterm exams and evokes much of the same anxiety) some of us are also preparing for Hallowe’en, the Eve of All Saints Day for Christians and for pagans, Samhain, a word that translates from Gaelic as Summer’s End. Many Mexican-Americans will celebrate Día de los Muertos. Though these holidays are culturally and historically distinct, they share the same time of year and many of the same customs, particularly the honoring of the dead, the acknowledgment of worlds and realities beyond our immediate ken.

However long term their effects, elections happen in the frenzy of a particular moment and climate, currently a desperate and divisive one. The holy days which precede this sacred, secular rite — the casting of the ballot — can offer a longer view, both comforting and profound in its perspective.

“[Social media] makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”

This provocative assertion was made by Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker piece, “Small Change,” published earlier this month.

To sum it up quickly, Gladwell’s article is centered around what kind of activism social-media outlets are really motivating. Specifically, he talks about Twitter and Facebook, and omits -though it is public knowledge- that he doesn’t use and doesn’t like Twitter. But we’ll let that slide. The article first relates the story of four African-Americans who, in 1960, were refused service at a restaurant in Greensboro, NC, for having sat down on seats that were reserved for “white people.” The episode sparked a massive and violent student protest which “became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade – and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.”

By the end of the article you’ll see that he clearly thinks that Internet-based social activism is effective only when it requires 1) less effort, 2) less personal involvement, and 3) less hierarchical organization than when it does not. Following this logic, we could say that it’s easy to retweet someone else’s message about a rally happening somewhere, and it’s easy to like it on Facebook and say you will be attending the event, but when it comes to actually making phone calls, and printing out flyers, and organizing meetings, or putting our personal freedom at risk, our motivation to participate quickly fades. Problem is, Gladwell explains, that real, radical social movements have always required high-risk actions and close ties among their members, not to mention a strong organizational component. Gladwell concludes that social media today is useful only for small-scale, low-involvement social participation.

Several social-media critics have responded toGladwell’s claims, includingTwitter co-founder Biz Stone himself. Most of them disagree with Gladwell’s assessment. Some smart readers do too.They criticize Gladwell for making an unfair comparison between “Twitter activism” and the Civil Rights Movement, and they say that Gladwell is making a big mistake by dismissing the entire spectre of possibilities of social networking. His view, they say, is anachronistic and unrealistic. The world doesn’t function and doesn’t organize itself the same way it did in the 60s. The enemies are different. So are the players.

This week’s spiritual wisdom is a poem written by Jonathan Granoff about how seeking and knowing God leads to peace. Granoff serves as president of the Global Security Institute, which pursues peace by promoting arms control and nuclear disarmament. His poetry has been featured on Tikkun Daily in the past.

For This Knowing

A hidden treasure longing to be known made us,
so that through us and in us and with us,
that treasure could be known.
Through the wisdom that grows in beauty
it happens.

And for this knowing, all of us are here together,
where,
in God’s grace,
we are one
and each one is known
in its own nuance.

Multinationals' cultivation of oil palm seeds like this one has forced Colombian farmers off their land.

The Body Shop recently announced its decision to sever commercial ties with Daabon Organic, the British cosmetic company’s main supplier of palm oil, one year after learning about Daabon’s involvement in a consortium that displaced Colombian farmers.

The announcement — which offers a glimmer of hope that the expectations of “conscious consumers” actually do affect big corporations’ behaviors, at least a little bit — comes in the wake of an exposé published last year by The Observer, which exposed Daabon Organic’s involvement in a consortium that succeeded in expelling over 100 families from the estate of Las Pavas in the district of Buenos Aires — located in Bolivar, Colombia­ — for additional space to harvest palm.

I intuitively feel that these experiences, mystical but also sensual and embodied, are the core of spirituality and the foundation that religions build their vast tottering edifices upon: these experiences that work for us, that we then work hard to name and explicate in full logical or fantastically elaborated detail. Naming is not only important but unavoidable … but once the naming develops into major exclusionary truth claims, … and once these get identified with the worldly power involved in religious organization then all the power of the experience gets harnessed to the groupthink and the powerplays (exclusions, repressions and crusades) and we have the worst of religion.

Dave Belden in response to How I Became a Pagan

Reading Dave’s comment, I was reminded of Deepak Chopra’s saying “God gave humans the truth, and the devil came and he said, ‘Let’s give it a name and call it religion.’” There is an inescapable tension between experience and the words we use to describe that experience, which cannot help but remove us from the experience itself. Ted Hughes warns us eloquently: “In a way, words are continually trying to displace our experience. And insofar as they are stronger than the raw life of our experience, and full of themselves and all the dictionaries they have digested, they do displace it.” Yet Hughes as a poet chose to use words to create extraordinary experiences for his readers. How do you communicate without words? How do you guide people on a spiritual path without names for the landmarks they are passing?

On the vision quest I wrote about, Oriah was certainly conscious of that tension. When we came back from the vision quest, we were not allowed to talk to anyone about our experience, because once we did it would become a story, and we would remember the story and how we had told it rather than the experience. After a day, we met as a group and shared the experience of our vision quest with one another, in mime. No words allowed. This was (radical understatement) a challenge, but it forced us to focus on the physical, emotional, and spiritual experience rather than moving into the intellectual world, which I at least certainly do all too easily. I remember one woman, who simply sat in the centre of our circle, and peeled an onion, layer after layer, as tears rolled down her face. When I go to sweat lodges in my tradition, we are always encouraged not to speak to any one for seven days about our experience in the lodge, so that we have time to process the experience before it becomes a story.

America Meditates 2010 - Lima, Peru

The international nongovernmental organization The Art of Living — founded in 1981 by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar — held a massive meditation ceremony last Sunday under the motto: “America Meditates — Because Peace Is Contagious.” Joining in for a synchronized meditation session were over thirty cities throughout the American continent, from Buenos Aires to New York City. Last year, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar’s event gathered over 20,000 people:

The aim was to soothe the suffering of people post a period which has seen economic challenges, political turmoil and natural disasters. Comfort, a sense of belonging and responsibility toward the community, and a positive approach were the natural outcomes when thousands of people united in an atmosphere of peace and calm. Some of the experiences of people: “Thank you for coming to my city and share this wonderful experience with us,” and “We need this kind of events in my country. Please keep doing them.”

Before or after the event, I could not find any information pointing to meditation sessions being scheduled in any West Coast city. Did any Tikkun readers hear about/participate in the event?

Here are some videos from last Sunday:

Yesterday an estimated 1 million people wore purple to raise awareness about bullying of LGBTQ youth. In light of the highly publicized series of suicides related to homophobic bullying, many of us are wondering how we can help LGBTQ youth. To answer this question, I’ve been reflecting on what helped me as a queer teenager in an aggressively homophobic community. By the time I was 15, nearly every one of my LGBTQ-identified friends had tried to kill themselves. I was alone in not attempting suicide. There are many factors of course, but I keep thinking of Noach Dzmura’s comment in the current issue of Tikkun,”Liberal religions save queer lives daily.” Having a loving, inclusive religious community was the biggest sources of inspiration and support that I had, one that my queer friends and peers lacked.

I grew up in a fairly rural small town in an extremely conservative state. Bullying because of queerness, perceived queerness or gender difference was common and ranged from verbal harassment, threats, and having our lockers defaced to being kicked, pushed, beaten, and pelted with rocks. In high school, one of my out gay male friends received death treats at school, and as far as I knew, nothing was ever done about it. Though the peer bullying was terrible, it was adult acceptance of our harassment that wore us down.

I had a handful of wonderful teachers who I knew cared about us and would fight for us, but many others who ignored or even encouraged homophobia. There was no gay-straight alliance at our school and starting one, even less than a decade ago, felt impossible and unsafe. More than one teacher told their class that homosexuality was wrong or that gender nonconforming people were “mixed up” and needed fixing. Most teachers and administrators simply said nothing, especially when they needed to speak up. This wasn’t limited to homophobia. They were just as silent when boys groped objecting girls in class or when racial slurs were casually used by white students, even when students asked them to intervene. My town was just a few hours away from the then-headquarters of the Aryan Nations, and I remember very few teachers ever speaking a word against the violent hate group. (As I left for college, the Aryan Nations was sued into bankruptcy for shooting at two Native Americans who’d pulled over near the group’s compound).

There are many indications that large numbers of Americans are depressed about their prospects. Democrats, historically the party of hope, are 20% less likely to vote than Republicans. 15% of the country is unemployed, and no one outside the financial industry feels good about his or her economic prospects. Something close to 70% of Americans tell pollsters that they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Large numbers of Americans, including even immigrants, are afraid that their children will have worse prospects in life than them. International affairs specialists tell us that America’s global position is in decline.

All of these indicators are important but none of them explain the core problem: the affect of depression that is at the center of American life today. That affect has a specific cause; it is not the result of a series of adversities. It is rooted in the institution that historically has been integral to the country’s optimistic, “can-do,” forward-looking character: the Presidency.

The problem started with George W. Bush or, more specifically, with the opportunity that 9/11 gave Bush to remake American society and government in the most drastic ways. Certainly the young men who attacked the World Trade Center hoped that the United States would overreact to their provocation, but even in their wildest dreams they never could have imagined anything as stupidly self-destructive as what ensued. Like a blinded Cyclops, an over-muscled nation rose from the debris to mindlessly rain technological destruction on another colored people. With a great roar of self-righteousness, a victim psychology, a martyrology, was used to justify the discarding of civil liberties, the institution of torture, wiretapping, surveillance, and every variety of illegal power. When one adds to this the setting in overdrive of the mercenary greed in place since Reagan, the corruption of money, real estate, accounting, corporate law, and most forms of investing – it became very hard to be an American during the Bush years.

But the one thing Bush did not destroy was hope. On the contrary, the longer that grinning caricature of a Wild West sheriff stayed in office, the deeper and the more intense the longing for change became. Bush created many of the problems we are saddled with today, but he did not create the hopelessness. That was Obama’s contribution.

What’s unique about Tikkun? Why might you want to give to help this blog survive?

The first thing I love about Tikkun is that it celebrates spirituality and nonviolence, but it’s not at all afraid to throw out big challenges and engage in spiritually informed, nonviolent conflicts.

Who does it challenge?

• Above all: the capitalist system and all other systems of domination, with their attendant wars, prisons, poverty, racism, gender oppressions and environmental destruction.
• Next: all those good people who are into spirituality, religion and nonviolence, but who don’t recognize or want to tackle the systems of domination, because they think that if individuals change, that’s all that is needed and anyway, all we can ever do. They have forgotten how it is people, acting together, organized and visionary, who pull down tyrants and build up cooperative, caring societies.
• But also: those of our fellow comrades on the left who totally get it about systemic oppression, and who want a partnership system, a caring society, but who have lost track of the spiritual basis of the struggle. The revolution really does grow from love, cooperation, awe, and deep ethical values: if we don’t talk those up and practice them, we lose.

Tikkun magazine has a long and venerable history and Tikkun Daily is an effort to bring more people into the project, reach more people with this unique worldview. The blog is often more like meeting Tikkun authors and fellow spiritual progressives for dinner than it is like hearing a prepared speech.

So here you will find radical psychiatrist Harriet Fraad explaining why the French strikes are happening to conservative commenters who lack a class analysis. Peace and civil rights scholar Valerie Elverton-Dixon screams silently about the current elections. Eli Zaretsky, history prof at Eugene Lang College, punctures liberal optimism and excoriates Obama. But Lauren Reichelt, deep in the health care struggle in a huge low income county in New Mexico, explains how much she has been helped in her work by the Obama administration. Michael Lerner always presents the biggest vision that Obama could take up and offers practical advice for how he could do it even while making political compromises. This isn’t a one-point-of-view blog.

Among our critiques of religious and spiritual movements read Catholic journalist, David Sylvester‘s deep analysis of the troubles of his church, Buddhist Natalie Wendt on social justice in Buddhism, Unitarian Universalist Jan Garrett on the challenges to his denomination, and yoga instructor and seminary student Be Scofield on the unwitting racism in the yoga world.

Scientists have discovered a sixth reason why the Democrats are in trouble. Barack Obama is using his pre-frontal cortex while the rest of us are all caught up in the limbic system, the reptilian brain that triggers emotion. As the President explained to a group of Democratic donors in Massachusetts: “Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared. And the country is scared.” Apparently it never occurred to the hard-wired, no-drama community organizer, that if people were scared it was his job to reassure them, not offer “facts and science and argument,” but what do I know.

[See here for Eli Zaretsky's other five reasons. Ed]

Photo from "Islamophobia" by Chris Allen, at http://wallscometumblingdown.wordpress.com/

My thanks to a commenter named Berfrois for a link to an openDemocracy article by Markha Valenta on “The Success of Islamophobia.”

Berfrois comments: “The success of Islamophobia in western Europe is both striking and disconcerting. How, after fifty years of the institutionalised nurture of human rights and anti-racism could an ideology of vicious discrimination gain such ground?”

But when you read the vehement comments on openDemocracy it’s clear that a good number of people base their Islamophobia on the fear that it is the very “fifty years of the institutionalised nurture of human rights and anti-racism” that is in danger. It’s in danger, they believe, from Islamic immigrants, and not from their own anti-Islamic rhetoric and politics. While there may obviously be concealed racism in this, it is more an argument — or phobia — about preserving “our culture” against “their culture,” with the ironic twist that “our culture” is now increasingly defined by its most liberal elements, including the feminism and GLBT rights that “our culture” rejected not so long ago!

George Washington Bridge (photo: Hist. Am. Engineering Record collection)

Dear Dr. Mohler,

You began your open letter, “Between the Boy and the Bridge: A Haunting Question” with a pained query about whether there was anyone who might have stood between the young gay man Tyler Clementi and the George Washington Bridge. I’d like to begin my answer with a scripture passage.

Mark 3:1-6: Again [Jesus] entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they mightaccuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come forward.’ Then he said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

Was Jesus being a bad Jew here? That depends on your definition. If one must adhere scrupulously to the letter of the law, Jesus didn’t. But why didn’t he adhere scrupulously to the letter of the law? Because it was more important to contribute to the man’s well-being than it was to follow laws that could not possibly have been able to predict every single situation to which they would be applied long after they were written. Indeed, Jews know this, which is why there have been commentaries and debates about the interpretation of the commandments for centuries.

The above passage from Mark seems to me entirely relevant to the situation of Tyler Clementi and the hundreds of other lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who have killed themselves because the messages they received from society (and especially from conservative religion) about their sexuality were life-destroying.

That silent scream you heard, that reverberating vibration that you felt, that disturbance in the force that caused you to pause this past Sunday was me screaming silent screams at my television as I watched debates in several senate races. What is a silent scream? This is when the body and breath tenses as if to scream and rather than releasing a sound, one releases a cleansing breath.

I perform these silent screams so that my family watching the NFL on Sundays do not call 9-1-1 thinking that I have experienced some kind of psychotic break. These debates are enough to make a body want to just hand back one’s sanity. I am a Sabbath-keeping Baptist. I learned to honor the Sabbath from my Jewish friends. Because I write six days a week, I only write on Sundays to take notes during the sermon during worship. So, I cannot accurately name the names of the candidates in the various debates. Perhaps this is a good thing because some of what came out of the mouths of these people is worth writing about only as a source of incredulity.

I could not believe the distortions, the lack of logic, the irrelevancies and the outright nonsense that I heard. But what I really found frustrating was the discussion around health care.

Bill Mauldin

Yesterday I came back from 9 days of teaching in a yearlong NVC leadership program. This was the last intensive of the year, and the 9th year of the program. As is often the case, I came face to face with the limits of my own leadership capacity. Specifically, I was grappling with my aversion to imposing anything on anyone, an ongoing challenge of significant intensity for me. Based on observing myself I am confident that because of this aversion I regularly involve groups in decisions that reduce efficiency of functioning without adding much empowerment value or meaning.

In one of those ironies of timing, this was also the week in which I read “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted.” According to this article (and I confess not being deeply educated on the topic), the Civil Rights movement was heavily centralized in its leadership style. I found that fact disturbing, fascinating, complex, and provocative. Specifically, I find a generative tension in juxtaposing the effectiveness of the Civil Rights movement in its form of leadership with the anti-authoritarian ethos that came to prevail in many subsequent social change movements and lives in me in the form of this aversion to imposing.

Circumstances wouldn’t allow the topic to recede into the background. Yesterday I led a workshop at the Bioneers 2010 conference – Everyone Matters: Interdependence in Action, a topic which emerges directly from the core vision that inspires the work I do with Nonviolent Communication. The questions of leadership were once again prominent: What does this vision tell us about leadership? Is anti-authoritarianism the only way to ensure that everyone’s needs matter? What does all this mean in terms of our collective capacity to contribute to transformation on a significant scale, and to do it with love, courage, and creativity?