Anyone driving through Madison, Wisconsin in April and May would have recognized those nine beeps of car and truck horns, ubiquitous throughout the city: This is what democracy looks like!

Wisconsin State Capitol

The mainstream media focused on unions, of course, public and private, coming together in unexpected solidarity, but not everyone realized that spiritual and religious groups played a significant role as well. And here’s something that will challenge your prejudices: evangelical groups were among them. Together with the religious organizations that form the usual progressive “suspects,” they chanted their own variation on a theme: This is what religion looks like.

Bruno, Hawkings, Dowling at WCSA

Houses of Worship: the new “public” spaces for political action?

Churches, temples, synagogues, and mosques have an ambivalent history with social justice, but a panel at the Working Class Studies conference in Chicago this June offered evidence of deep and innovative support for justice movements, worker rights in particular, which really inspired me. Not everyone knows, for example, that during the Wisconsin Uprising, a Shabbat service was held in the Capitol with Hebrew songs in which Rabbi Renee Bauer played a key role. Or that four hundred clergy signed a statement of support, and one hundred fifty of them marched in the protests. Robert Bruno, author of Justified by Work, moderated an impressive panel consisting of Father Larry Dowling, a Catholic priest from a 50 percent unemployed, 55 percent ex-incarcerated parish, and Rev. C. J., . Hawking, Executive Director of Arise Chicago, and Minister of Social Justice at the Euclid Avenue Methodist Church. Unfortunately, Rabbi Brant Rosen, leader of an activist Jewish Reconstructionist congregation, and a Muslim Imam were not able to come.

As if we haven’t had enough unexpected twists in the Oslo tragedy, a fascinating op-ed on Islamophobia by none other than Abe Foxman (“Norwegian attacks stem from a new ideological hate – The Washington Post“) of the Anti-Defamation League appeared in yesterday’s Washington Post.

I don’t often find myself agreeing with Mr. Foxman on issues involving Muslims – though I certainly share his concerns about the use of anti-Semitism as a political tool by Muslim extremists — but I think he is to be applauded for this principled and thoughtful warning about the growing threat of Islamophobia. Most interestingly, Foxman explitly explores the profound parallels between this new hate and the age-old “Socialism of Fools” that the ADL exists to fight.

Abe Foxman: “Norwegian attacks stem from a new ideological hate” – The Washington Post

One of the things I do in life is talk to strangers whenever I have any inkling of a possible human connection, however momentary. These acts feel precious and a little subversive. Talking about these moments feels oddly more vulnerable than the act of reaching for the connection in the first place, and so I rarely do it. Yesterday I experienced two in a row that were so meaningful I decided to risk the embarrassment for the hope of inspiring others to join me.

I was walking out of the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, and a woman was coming towards me from a distance. Even though I couldn’t see her clearly, her appearance and presence captured my eye. I just loved how she looked. As we walked towards each other, I saw that her hair was completely white, and I thought to myself that she probably wouldn’t think of herself as looking great. As she walked by, I stopped her and asked if I could speak to her for a moment. I saw the expression, the moment of hesitation, wondering who I was or why I would want to talk with her, maybe a concern I might ask for something. And so I told her that what I had to say was unusual, and that I just wanted to tell her that she looked great. Oh, how she lit up in that moment. I mentioned to her that I didn’t imagine she would have that thought about herself. She said she was 76, and I said that was part of what I so enjoyed, that she didn’t pretend to be younger than her age. She smiled and laughed throughout this dialogue, and in the end told me with some glee that she was going to tell her husband. I stayed with it long enough to satisfy myself that she really took it in.

by Julia Wong

Wanxia Ma (back right) and 79 other hotel workers and allies engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at San Francisco's Grand Hyatt hotel.

Hotel housekeepers are rarely seen, let alone heard. A neatly uniformed woman pushing an enormous cart of linens, towels, and cleaning supplies down a hallway; the occasional knock on the door and soft cry of “Housekeeping,” when you’ve slept in: this is the only evidence most hotel guests ever get of the women who create the luxurious environs of hotel rooms. But for the past three weeks, Wanxia Ma, a thirty-nine-year-old housekeeper at San Francisco’s storied Fairmont Hotel, has traded in her quiet mop for a picket-line drum, joining other hotel workers in a nationwide campaign to achieve justice for Hyatt workers.

Wanxia is one of dozens of housekeepers who have taken leaves of absence from their hotel jobs this summer to speak out about the abuse housekeepers in union and non-union Hyatt hotels face every day. In San Francisco, Chicago, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C., these women are fighting on behalf of workers in non-union Hyatts who are trying to achieve a fair process to form a union without fear of intimidation and threats from management but can rarely speak out for fear they will lose their jobs. Wanxia and her sister room cleaners spend every day meeting with community groups, members of the clergy, and Hyatt customers to tell their stories and enlist the groups’ support. Recently a group of rabbis investigated working conditions at Hyatt hotels around the country and declared Hyatt non-Kosher. For details on their investigation and a copy of their report, see www.justiceathyatt.org.

BREAKING: Congress has agreed on a new debt ceiling plan! Huge savings will come through a Social Security and Medicare reform program that’s also eco-friendly. It’s called “Soylent Green.” Obama: “We’ve always known that the solution to these problems lies in the American people themselves.” Details to follow.

by Richard D. Wolff

The national debt theatrics in Washington — posturing by both parties for the 2012 presidential election — do show the world how badly U.S. politics have become disconnected from economic realities. If indeed, the two parties play out this drama to the point of actually preventing the debt ceiling from being raised, it will block all sorts of government expenditures causing all sorts of damage to recipients of U.S. spending and to the reputation the U.S. has enjoyed as the safest, securest economy in the world. Let’s remember that the U.S. government — scheduled to spend $3.5 trillion this year, of which 43 per cent has to be borrowed — is the largest single buyer of commodities in the world (largest buyer of oil, military equipment, computers, etc.). Cutting back on U.S. government expenditures is just exactly what a crisis-ridden world economy does not need.

House Speaker John Boehner urges President Obama to cut spending during debt negotiations in Washington, July 2011. Credit: Creative Commons/SpeakerBoehner.

Nor does the U.S. need what apparently Obama and the Republicans have agreed to, namely significant cuts to spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Those too will add to the downward economic pressures. Republicans are counting on the pain and suffering this crisis has wrought to provoke their supporters to vent their rage by denouncing government in general and Obama and the Democrats in particular. The Republicans try to position themselves as the anti-government champions who will at least make sure the government does not add extra taxes to everyone’s economic burdens. The Democrats attack the Republicans for protecting rich folks from higher taxes and promise that the cuts they would make to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will be less than what the Republicans would do. Neither side explains why the national debt is high now, what the real options are to bring it down, and what the costs and benefits of those options would likely be. Doing that honestly risks offending corporate and rich donors who do not want all their benefits from the government tampered with. Neither party admits or deals with how the economic crisis since 2007 and the government bailouts of business that followed — and that both parties fully endorsed – produced the bulge in national debts everywhere. Instead, we get ideological slogans and endless posturing despite the real economic risks attached. Worse still, we get a consensus shared by Republicans and Democrats to respond to years of (1) tax reductions for corporations and the rich, (2) proliferating wars costing trillions, and (3) expensive corporate bailouts by refusing to deal with those issues and instead debating how much to cut benefits for retired workers and fellow citizens needing health insurance.

In the interests of a reality check, let’s take a step back and look at deficits and debt with some perspective.

Spiritual progressives often say they are open to wisdom in other faith traditions. One way we can practice this openness is to appreciate what people operating from other perspectives say when they say it well and then present our differences in the framework of basic respect. Starting a conversation of this sort is a way of strengthening a shared spiritual journey.

In April of this year, members of the Bowling Green community in Western Kentucky had a chance to hear Brian McLaren present his analysis of current global problems and his vision of how to confront them inspired by his interpretation of the message of Jesus. A more elaborate version of his view is found in Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crisis, and a Revolution of Hope (Nashville, TN, 2007). McLaren is an evangelical Christian — a fairly radical progressive evangelical, in fact.

I intend to summarize his diagnosis of the problems, then explain how he understands Jesus’ message, which he contrasts with the visions advocated by rival social movements forces in Jesus’ time. I will assume that McLaren accurately gauges the social message of Jesus – if you want to question that assumption, we can take it up in discussion. Then I will indicate how he sees Jesus’ perspective addressing our problems today. Finally, in a second, related post, I will discuss the adequacy of this approach as a strategy for our times.

Four Global Problems

Drawing from public official and theological sources, McLaren identifies four root problems, or global emergencies – the “PPPR” problems: Planet (global environmental issues), Poverty (apparent economic injustice in the absence of opportunities for vast numbers of human beings), Peace (the prevalence of war and all the devastation that it causes), and Religion. Not surprisingly, he thinks that some forms of religion hold out more hope for solving our problems than others.

The shocking acts committed in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik put right-wing extremism back on the radar of threats we should be concerned about.

One might refer to him as a right-wing Christian terrorist. While I believe that Breivik violated the tenets of Christianity when he engaged in terrorism in Oslo and massacred children at a Labour Party youth camp, he explicitly claims the mantel of Christianity, believing he acts to defend European Christendom from Muslim immigrants and multiculturalism. Thus he is similar to “Islamic” terrorists, who violate the principles of Islam yet explicitly claim to be acting in the name of Islam. If we use the religious label in one case, we should probably use it in both cases.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ought to be monitoring right-wing extremists, but apparently they are not currently doing so. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), right-wing violence is on the rise. As Mark Potok explains in “The Year in Hate & Extremism,”

Flickr: Syria Damascus Douma Protests 2011 - 22

When I posted a while back about Ray McGovern and the Gaza Flotilla, one commenter engaged me in a fairly long and robust conversation (a polite phrase for a heated email dialogue). Among the many points tossed at me was one question that I was truly at a loss to answer. Why wasn’t there much commentary about what was happening in Syria? Why weren’t my lefty friends and I doing something about the mayhem there? For me, the answer was simple. I knew very little about Syria. None of the usual organizations and media outlets I count on had much information, let alone calls to action. Until now…

When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s moving and complex documentary A Lot Like You at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 2011, one of my first responses to this film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. Having just finished reviewing The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities for Bitch magazine, I was interested in seeing more concrete examples of community accountability, which the authors define as “any strategy to address violence, abuse or harm that creates safety, justice, reparations, and healing without relying on police, prisons, childhood protective services, or any other state systems.” A Lot Like You brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context.

I sought out Eliaichi, a Seattle filmmaker and activist, for an interview and was excited to learn that she also sees her film as capturing the beginning of a family accountability process. The film was originally titled Worlds Apart, and its change to A Lot Like You reflects the journey that Eliaichi embarked upon while creating this documentary about her relationship to her father’s side of the family – the Chagga tribe in Tanzania, who live on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. The first cut of the film emphasized the cultural differences in her family, which “spans many different continents and worlds,” but the final version emphasizes Eliaichi’s connection to her Chagga relatives.

After growing up in Tanzania, her father Sadikiel Kimaro earned a scholarship to pursue his PhD in economics in the US where he met his future wife, Young, a student from Korea. While his five siblings remained behind in Tanzania, Sadikiel spent the next forty years or so working for the IMF, while Young worked at the World Bank. They raised Eliaichi and her brother in a suburb of Washington, DC. After her parents retired to Tanzania, Eliaichi and her partner Tom decided to join them with the intention of filming for nine months, partly because Eliaichi felt only a “hazy connection” to her Tanzanian family in spite of having spent every other summer there as a child.

Setting out to portray culture in Tanzania, they interviewed members of Eliaichi’s family and filmed different aspects of Chagga life, but often bumped into cultural disconnect and miscommunication. In the film’s voiceover narration, Eliaichi describes how “everyone around us performed their version of Chagga culture, one they thought that I, as a tourist, wanted to see.” The first cut of the film was focused on Eliaichi’s father’s story, but included interviews with her two aunts who describe, in brutal detail, how their marriage rituals involved violence. Her aunts did not know that Eliaichi was also a survivor of trauma.

Eiren Caffall © 2010

I have just come home from an island.

It is small and magical, and set 12 nautical miles out into the Atlantic, and I have been returning there in the summers since I was a teenager. I have been drunk on its landscape since I first set foot there, seasick and naive, and trailed behind my parents through the cathedral woods and stumbled onto a marsh awash in wild iris that I followed to the shore.

I was hooked then. I was in sway to the place.

In upcoming months, President Obama alone will decide on the fate of the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would bring dirty, muddy oil from Canada down to Texas to be cooked and processed to feed our addiction to this temporary resource. Please consider writing a letter to friends, family, or co-workers, or coming out to Washington between the and of August and early September.

I was honored to be invited to be on a panel with the Dalai Lama July 18 in Chicago. This is the third time I’ve been invited to be on a panel with him, and by now he recognizes me. His first words when we embraced yesterday were: “Last time your kippah was red, now it’s white–but very nice!” He was referring to the head covering that religious Jews wear on our heads, also known as “yalmekah” or skullcap. (He doesn’t seem to change his outfit very often–it’s beautiful color and simplicity bespeaks his philosophy).

He had his usual twinkle in his eye and smile on his face. This great spiritual leader is renowned for his impish qualities, his humility, and his smarts, and all were in full view both Sunday, July 18, when he addressed some 8,000 people in a huge auditorium in Chicago, and on Monday when we sat together on a panel in a smaller venue of 1,500 seats, every seat filled, and discussed interfaith connections.

Unlike Sunday, when the sound system was imperfect and it was sometimes hard to make out what he was saying, on Monday July 19, it was impossible to not be astounded by the Dalai Lama’s combination of cleverness and spiritual depth. His themes are well known, and he returned to them over and over again: the need for compassion, the importance of recognizing that all religions are pointing to the same realities, the centrality of non-violence in changing the world, and the need to work on one’s own spiritual life simultaneously with any work in changing the world.

In my previous post I shared two examples of how a conflict can be transformed by being held together with another as a shared dilemma: what can we do here to respond to both of our needs? Today I want to illustrate with a third example between father and teenage daughter.

Sharing Responsibility with a Teenager
Bob, the divorced father of a 15 year old, was struggling with a challenge that involved both his daughter and his ex. When his daughter was with him, she went to sleep late, woke up late, and was often late for school. This threatened her mother’s continued willingness to have her stay with Bob. He brought up this issue during a telecourse with me, and was beside himself about how to proceed. The night before, for example, he asked his daughter to stop playing games on her iphone and go to bed, to which she said “get out of my face” and to which he said “this is not OK.” Tension arose as he proceeded to take away her iphone and insist she go to bed. This was not the relationship he wanted to have with his daughter. What could he do instead? What is the dilemma he could invite his daughter to hold together with him?

As things stood, Bob was in full blown mini-war with her. He tries to force her, which at the age of 15 is extremely difficult to do, and she resists and fights back. This is a losing strategy. The more he threatens, the more he attempts to enforce rules, the less connection and trust they have. His daughter, like every teenager, and like every human being, wants to have autonomy, to make her own choices about her life, to move about in ways that are meaningful to her and flow from within her, not based on someone else’s rules.

No matter what we do and where we are, life always presents us with an unending succession of things to work out with other people. Those range from inconsequentials like going to a Thai or Chinese restaurant with a friend all the way to major differences in values, worldview, or life choices. Whether or not such differences turn into conflicts depends largely on how we face them. We create conflict when we polarize and separate from the other person, because we don’t know how to hold what’s important to us alongside what’s important to the person with whom we have the differences. I derive a great deal of hope and sustenance from the growing evidence I have, through my own life and the many people I have worked with, that conflict is not the only option. Even in very tough circumstances we can find ways of holding together with others the dilemma of not seeing a way forward that works for everyone. At the very least genuine togetherness creates dramatic shifts in the experience of the difference. We may experience collective mourning at not finding a way rather than fighting with each other to get our way. Or we may sometimes experience nothing short of magic. An unexpected solution may emerge. Or one of the parties relaxes from knowing their needs are included, and lets go without acrimony. Or the mere fact of removing the tension dissolves the issue.

I’d like to illustrate with three examples. Two are personal relationships, and one a workplace relationship. One is a relationship of equals, and two have power differences on top of the issues. The names and some of the circumstances are changed to protect anonymity.

Facing Cancer Together
At a workshop for people with cancer and those who care for them I had the opportunity to work with a couple on a painful conflict. Jane was facing pancreatic cancer and Susan, her partner, was caring for her. Their issue was quite significant. Jane, a former physician, was holding out complete hope for her recovery despite the common assumption that pancreatic cancer is fatal. Susan was completely distraught, because she couldn’t get Jane to talk with her about what would happen when she died.

I don’t know if Claire Snyder-Hall is correct that there’s a Constitutional remedy to the crisis looming on raising the Federal debt limit. Still, her links to Paul Krugman’s NY Times “Conscience of a Liberal” blog are instructive. There’s also Krugman’s print column, in which he speculates that Obama may actually believe the right-wing line on the need to curb the national debt even at this time of sluggish economic growth and high unemployment:

One striking example of this rightward shift came in last weekend’s presidential address, in which Mr. Obama had this to say about the economics of the budget: “Government has to start living within its means, just like families do. We have to cut the spending we can’t afford so we can put the economy on sounder footing, and give our businesses the confidence they need to grow and create jobs.”

That’s three of the right’s favorite economic fallacies in just two sentences. No, the government shouldn’t budget the way families do; on the contrary, trying to balance the budget in times of economic distress is a recipe for deepening the slump. Spending cuts right now wouldn’t “put the economy on sounder footing.” They would reduce growth and raise unemployment. And last but not least, businesses aren’t holding back because they lack confidence in government policies; they’re holding back because they don’t have enough customers – a problem that would be made worse, not better, by short-term spending cuts. …

In fact, the loud warnings of both outstanding left-liberal Nobel Laureate economists, Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, that Obama’s stimulus package was too small, seem to have been entirely accurate. They had advocated expenditures of about $1.3 trillion, rather than the $700 billion stimulus package that has not reduced unemployment to normal levels. Still, most economists agree that it has prevented unemployment from ballooning to around 12 percent.

Photo by Anne Marino of the Israeli side of the Lebanon-Israel border

Our friends the Traubmans believe that the difference between an enemy and a friend is a story. They recommended that a key part of our shop be a place where people could sit in a circle and share their stories. The other day, Annie Marino, who’d recently returned from two years teaching in Lebanon and had spent two weeks in Israel on her way back, sat with us in those chairs and told us about her experience. Feeling that her stories would be a good fit for Tikkun Daily, I asked her to start writing about her experiences. This is the first installment.

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A Look Back for a Look Forward by Anne Marino

As of writing this, it is five years ago to the day that I canceled what would have been my first trip to Israel, due to a war with Hezbollah that had stretched a week with no immediate end in sight (it turned out to be 19 more days).  It has now been two weeks since I returned from Israel for the third time, on my way home from a two-year stint working as a middle school history teacher in a suburb of Beirut, Lebanon.

There was good news on the front page of the New York Times this week. Apparently, “a leading medical advisory panel recommended on Tuesday that all insurers be required to cover contraceptives for women free of charge as one of the several preventive services under the new health care law,” and the Obama administration is “inclined to accept the panel’s advice.” Even better, no Congressional approval is required.

As Senator Barbara Mikulski put it, “We are one step closer to saying goodbye to an era when simply being a woman is treated as a pre-existing condition. We are saying hello to an era where decisions about preventive care and screenings are made by a woman and her doctor, not by an insurance company.”

Affordable contraceptives are sorely needed in the US, where “nearly half of all pregnancies” are unintended, and “about 40 percent of unintended pregnancies” end in abortion. Since women living in poverty are four times more likely to become pregnant unintentionally, there is reason to believe that price is an issue.

Because making contraceptives more accessible should decrease the number of abortions, the Christian Right ought to be rejoicing about this proposed policy. Strangely, however, the Family Research Council (FRC) opposes it. It is not strange that the Catholic Church opposes the measure, since they consider contraceptives immoral, but Protestant Christianity allows for the use of birth control. What gives?

Artist Carl Gopal’s interests are expansive, but he is by no means a dilettante. He is gifted with an ability to analyze current events in the context of the “big picture” without getting overwhelmed, weaving together schools of thought as diverse as popular culture and politics, spirituality and quantum physics. He is afraid that amid the exhilaration of rapid scientific advancement, we are losing the sense of humble awe at the universe that spurred our curiosity in the first place.

And Starring Benjamin Netanyahu as Norman Maine

To see more of Gopal’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery and visit the artist’s website.

Do feminist organizations have anything to say about the battle over the debt ceiling? If they do, it certainly hasn’t gotten much coverage. It seems that they should, since many of the budget cuts proposed by the Republican Party and the Obama Administration will slash funding for programs that meet human needs (and employ women).

Well, as it turns out, feminist organizations do have something to say about the budget. The National Organization for Women (NOW), for example, makes the following point:

Very soon, members of Congress will reach an agreement on how to reduce the federal deficit. As much as $4 trillion could be cut from the federal budget over the next decade. These cuts will touch upon virtually every program that serves and employs women. Currently, some negotiators are refusing to accept new taxes to raise revenues as part of the package, which could result in deep benefit cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and an array of other critical safety net programs. The economic well-being of women, communities or color, persons with disabilities, low-income earners and their families are at stake.

In response NOW, along with the National Council of Women’s Organizations, is asking our elected officials to “Respect, Protect, Reject” – to make sure “women are respected” in budgetary negotiations, “that programs which disproportionately serve and employ women are protected,” and that “any effort to undercut these programs [is] rejected.”