Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/davebelden/page/5/)
… it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us. — Charles Dickens
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?
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.” It’s Be’s birthday today and he serendipitously had a nice present.
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.
The controversy over Be Scofield’s post on perceived racism in the mainstream, chiefly white, yoga world seems to me to reflect a clash of at least three American cultures. All three are made up of decent people trying their best to survive, thrive and help this suffering world. Be straddles these cultures. In his post he talks in the voice of one of them to his friends in another of them, and is getting very angry responses from some of those friends, partly perhaps because of the influence of a third culture that is rising today and that a lot of us are trying to learn from. These three I am calling white liberal culture, the critical writings of the oppressed, and nonviolent speech and action.
I hope this is one humongously large rally in Washington today. Nonetheless, and I know this will sound bizarre, I am personally more excited for the future of social change by a small conference call taking place tomorrow morning, to which you are invited, than I am by the One Nation March. Curiously, the left online doesn’t seem very excited about the march either. There’s no mention of it on HuffPost’s front page as I write this morning. It’s not the top story on Alternet, and the headline isn’t “Huge Left Rally in DC” but “Anti-Tea Partiers Descend on Washington to Fight for a Stronger Economy,” which isn’t as anxious as Politico’s “Liberals hope rally rivals Beck’s” but similarly concedes that the Right has the initiative.
“Justice is co-created through the joining of deep neighbor-love with delight in the holy.” I love that sentence from Mike Hogue’s recent post. If that’s what it takes to create justice, no wonder we have so little of it. I mean, isn’t it a given that you lose deep neighbor-love when you move into the middle class? Isn’t losing deep neighbor-love the way that you make it yourself?
Let’s say you’re a doctor in your thirties. You graduated from UCSF School of Medicine, earned a master’s in social medicine from UC Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree from Harvard (the last two ranked second and first respectively among the world’s universities by a Chinese university focused on science). Your husband received his education at Harvard, Stanford and UC Berkeley. Your son is pre-school. You’re in a big city.
Mmm, nourishing: a veggie sandwich, just like Tikkun Daily. A smorgasbord of good things. We are looking for 200 of our readers who could give us $5 a month to keep us going, the price of a sandwich a month. Would you consider being one of them, by clicking here? Or would you give us a larger one-time donation?
We have just put up a transcript of a workshop at which veteran peace activists Gershon Baskin, Rebecca Subar and Arthur Waskow debated BDS with those present. (This was at our June conference and we apologize for the delay: our interns transcribed many speeches and workshops over the summer. We edited some for the print issue here, and more have been going online this month. Our thanks to long-time Tikkun activist Hayyim Feldman who just completed the lengthy task of proofing the text of this workshop to the audio.) Some quotes:
Israeli activist Gershon Baskin on Why a one state solution is no solution at all:
Now I believe very, very strongly that there is only one solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict, if solution means end of conflict. There is no such thing as a one state solution.
Sue Salinger is a long-time media writer/producer, student of Reb Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, and doctoral student in media philosophy: a new academic discipline to my ears at least. I met her at the US Social Forum where she was training novice reporters, one of whom shepherded me through an interview on Free Speech TV. She just sent me this post about the role of Twitter in the recent fires in Boulder, Colorado. She describes the thousands who used Twitter to tell each other about the direction of the fire, to offer help, prayers and information as “A beautifully anarchic collaboration.” I am personally resisting Twitter though we use it to promote Tikkun and this blog, but this impressed me.