Illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1909

Children have been told horror stories for as long as storytelling has existed. Should a child become traumatized hearing a story like Hansel and Gretel, where the witch plans to throw the children into the oven to make a nice meal, parents can tell the child not to worry, “That’s just a fairy tale. Things like that don’t really happen.” But they do.

Self Portrait

Sometimes in the midst of the mundane or the profane of the day, I find myself musing about the meaning of it all. My friend Rev. Jim Burklo just sent along his latest musing, and while it doesn’t answer all the questions about life, the universe, and everything, it did bring a smile to my face and some peace to my morning. May it do some of the same for you too. Read on!

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it was a courageous thing to do, but someone was already here... Something you'd know, unless you live in Tucson in 2012

It’s Martin Luther King Day and we should all be thinking about progress we’ve made on King’s dream. Well… this morning I woke up to more of a bit of a sad vision of at least one part of America. My friend Nancy Schimmel sent me a note this morning to let me know that Tucson, Arizona, in order to avoid losing lots of money in state school funding, has ordered certain books to be banned from classrooms in order to be in compliance with the state’s new “ethnic cleansing” rules (my phrase for what they refer to as the elimination of ethnic studies).

According to Bill Bigelow of Rethinking Schools (at Salon.com), “By ordering teachers to remove ‘Rethinking Columbus,’ the Tucson school district has shown tremendous disrespect for teachers and students.” “This is a book that has sold over 300,000 copies and is used in school districts from Anchorage to Atlanta, and from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. It offers teaching strategies and readings that teachers can use to help students think about the perspectives that are too often silenced in the traditional curriculum.”

My company, Reach And Teach, has sold many copies of Rethinking Columbus. The thought that this book, and Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” are being banned from Tucson schools boggles my mind.

When I first heard about Congress adding a provision to a Defense Authorization bill that would allow for the U.S. MILITARY to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens, without trial, just for being suspected of supporting anyone who was “engaged in hostilities against the United States,” I assumed it was just the work of some whacky right-winger who knew that the language didn’t have a chance of surviving the first round of mark-ups in conference committee. When the Senate and House overwhelmingly voted for the bill, with the President signing it in the dead of night when no one was looking, it struck me that something very strange was happening, and so far, no one has offered a serious explanation of why this bill came to be and is now law.

From my friend the Rev. Jim Burklo, of the Center for Progressive Christianity, a musing.

Press Release: The Virgin of Guadalupe Speaks
For immediate release

At a press conference in Los Angeles, CA, La Virgen de Guadalupe, on the 480th anniversary of her apparition in Mexico, suddenly appeared, held up on a crescent by a little cherubic angel. With brilliant effulgence surrounding her, she declared her independence from the Catholic Church specifically and from the Christian religion as a whole. “I belong to all humanity,” she declared. “No exceptions!”

Our friend Rev. Jim Burklo (Center for Progressive Christianity) just visited the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  His visit is chronicled in this latest musing that I found fascinating and wonderful, especially what happened at the very end… (read on).

We just heard from a colleague who was arrested in Oakland for…. assembling. While he was getting arrested we were having dinner with friends, one of whom said that he wished there were a simple, clear message coming from the 99%. Well, this morning, our friend Jim Burklo (The Center for Progressive Christianity) wrote one of his “musings” and in it he had a short and sweet message:

Protect the poor and middle-class with a strong public “safety net”, take strong action to protect the environment, raise taxes on the rich and cut military spending to balance the federal budget, and rationalize regulations so that private enterprise will thrive on a more level playing field.

Want more? Read on!

Creative Commons / Douglas606

After five years of being held captive, Gilad Shalit was returned to Israel in exchange for the release of over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Shalit (cousin of former Tikkun editor Joel Schalit) was kidnapped by Hamas when he was just 19 years old. There is certainly much to discuss about the Israeli government’s decision to make this deal, and the impact it will have on the future. For now, I am grateful that Shalit is home, safe, and my prayers are with him as he begins what is sure to be a long journey of healing. My prayers are also with the Palestinians released from prison, their families, and for their journey going forward. May this be a moment that begins healing for all sides that could lead to a lasting, just, peace.

Check out more on the story from the Washington Post (click here).

(Image courtesy Bloody Marty Mix / Flickr Creative Commons)

Last night as we helped our friends at Design Action Collective celebrate their many years of successfully empowering justice movements (including being the art designers for Tikkun Magazine for a long while), we met a young man who told us a stunning tale. He had tried to get his wife onto his health insurance plan and the company turned them down. Why? Because they weren’t legally married. He and the woman he loved had decided that marriage equality was an important enough justice issue that until their GLBTQ friends could get legally married, they wouldn’t. Instead, they had a wonderful ceremony with friends and family, but no license from the state. When he applied to add his wife to his insurance policy, the company actually checked state records and finding no license, issued no insurance. That’s not fair! I exclaimed…

All Photos Courtesy Alex Sennello

As we’ve been marking the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DODT) and the White House calling the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) unconstitutional, the “It Gets Better” campaign rings very true. At the same time, though, a Connecticut high school recently threw out a student for being gay and an Oklahoma legislator called homosexuality “a greater threat to America than terrorists.” So there’s lots of work to do.

Late last week we received a newsletter from Camp Ten Trees, an incredible place which I’ll let the letter below from camper Alex Sennello describe. Reach And Teach has proudly supported the camp since we were introduced to it by Jacinta Bunnell (Girls Are Not Chicks and Sometimes the Spoon Runs Away with Another Spoon). With places like Camp Ten Trees, and people like Alex, we can celebrate the work that’s been done to make things better for GLBTQ people and those who love them. And, by supporting programs like Camp Ten Trees, we can keep making it better and better. We’re grateful that Alex granted us permission to repost her letter and post some of her photos from Camp Ten Trees.

Ready to be inspired?

Read More!

Kristina Olsen at the Interfaith Worship Service We Held in Kabul

I’ve been blessed to have the opportunity to create and air over a dozen 2-minute “perspectives” on our local public radio station, KQED. The editor there asked those of us who have been on the program over the years to write a special perspective about how we experienced September 11th and the impact of those tragic events. Though mine didn’t make the cut for airing during a special half-hour program this weekend, I thought I would share it with my Tikkun Daily friends. What does the song I’ve Got You Babe have to do with September 11th? Read on.

Rarely does more than a week or so go by before something arrives in my inbox from Len and Libby Traubman, a couple that has helped lead a Palestinian/Jewish living room dialogue for two decades. And, opening that message always gives me a boost of hope for the world, even in the midst of bad news. Today was no different. They shared links to videos from an organization called Peace it Together. Check out this video and then, read more to learn about what happens when a Palestinian, an Israeli, and a Canadian spend part of their Summer vacation together, peace-building through film-making.

My cousin Marcia wrote to me the other day. I’ve been one of her anchors of hope amidst a lot of despair about the world situation. When she wrote this time though, I too was cranky. “Change we can believe in my tush!” Then, a few hours later, our shop was filled with Think Peace Workshop kids and their parents making scarves for children in Africa. The energy was simply amazing. And then this morning I was writing checks to some of the organizations we support and ran across this video from the Mosaic Project. Now, I don’t feel so cranky. Maybe this will lift your spirits too. There are amazing people and organizations working with children to make their world and ours a much better place. Read more if you’d like to know more about The Mosaic Project and Think Peace Workshop. And, if this kind of post makes you happy, let me know and I’ll tell you about other people and organizations doing wonderful things. If you’d rather just be cranky….. I’ll understand!

We got great feedback from Annie’s last post, so… here’s another post from Annie Marino who spent two years in Lebanon teaching.

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It did not take long for me to find that in Lebanon the perception of Jews, Israelis, and Israel is generally misinformed at best and virulent at worst. Over time, it appeared that the root of this misperception is a sobering combination of ignorance, and even more viscerally, fear.

Stories of ignorance related to Jews and Israel were so common they almost became mundane. Many of my students, thinking that Israel controlled Starbucks, were shocked to discover there was not a single Starbucks in Israel. My Arabic teacher inquired as to whether one of the stars on the American flag really stood for Israel, a fact she had learned at school. Within my first month teaching, the Lebanese government hastily required all schools that were using a particular American-printed history textbook (which we were) to insert censoring tape over certain sections that implied that Hezbollah was a terrorist organization. While not overly consequential in itself, the act of overt censorship startled me as a First Amendment-imbibed American, but it was also an indication that at times people may intentionally avoid knowledge or at least different perspectives.

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…

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.

As we sat in the “story time” area of our shop yesterday, working on a curriculum about service learning, a neighbor stopped in and thrust a news article into our hands. She was distraught about the news that Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst / presidential daily briefer and now anti-war activist, was getting ready to board a ship sailing to Gaza. This ship, named The Audacity of Hope, is one of a group of ships forming a flotilla to bring attention to and potentially break the blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip. Today the White House issued a warning to the nearly 40 Americans planning to sail on that ship that the U.S. would not only do nothing to protect them, but might prosecute them if they do break the blockade and survive to return to the United States. This won’t be the first time people risk harm, prosecution, or death for something they really believe in. Nor, thank goodness will it be the last.

Craig and Derrick in Their San Mateo Shop

Two decades ago someone like me wasn’t allowed to serve in the U.S. military openly, so after eight years of service, I left. Back then someone like Derrick wasn’t allowed to openly serve as a deacon, elder, or minister in the Presbyterian Church USA, so he joined a congregation that fought against that ban. That congregation, the First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto, had a long history of working for peace and social justice. Along with fully accepting Derrick and me for who we were, the people there also introduced us to the power of nonviolent resistance against injustice in all its forms, and opened our eyes to the many ways we were called to make the world a better place. By truly embracing us as individuals AND as a couple, they also set us on a path to where we are today.

It is 2011 and gays and lesbians can serve in the military and in the Presbyterian Church USA. My prayer is that my GLBTQ sisters and brothers, and all of the allies who have tirelessly worked for inclusion, will celebrate these victories and then join the global quest for peace, justice, and equality.

Image Courtesy Glen Edelson http://www.flickr.com/photos/glenirah/

I’m a big fan of Jim Burklo’s “Musings,” often posting them here at Tikkun Daily with his permission. This one reminded me of the Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the Constitution that Tikkun/NSP has been promoting and which once again got introduced in Congress. Check out Jim Burklo’s more individual/personal set of commandments.

1) Thou shalt not separate social from personal responsibility: thou art thine own keeper, and the keeper of thy brothers and sisters, too.

2) Thou shalt provide all children with basic survival needs for health, food, shelter, and safety even if it means bending the rules.

3) Thou shalt honor thy aged fathers and mothers by guaranteeing them comprehensive health care and a livable minimum pension and by paying their caretakers a living wage.

Tonight we’ll celebrate President Obama and Attorney General Holder’s decision to NOT defend the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in court. Following in the footsteps of former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and then California Attorney General Jerry Brown, the White House announced that the Justice Department could not defend DOMA, in part because “congressional debate during passage of the Defense of Marriage Act contains numerous expressions reflecting moral disapproval of gays and lesbians and their intimate and family relationships – precisely the kind of stereotype-based thinking and animus the (Constitution’s) Equal Protection Clause is designed to guard against.”

Could this be the beginning of the end of DOMA?