Master Sgt. Renee Baldwin fires a .50-caliber machine gun during a training session. Credit: Creative Commons/Joint Base Lewis McChord.

Alongside horrifying pictures from the New York Times showing very young boys being trained to fire assault rifles (“Selling a New Generation on Guns“) comes the news, welcome in some quarters, that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has ordered the military to admit women to full combat roles. I believe that this is not the way to equality.

Some years ago the philosopher Mary Midgley, unconsciously echoing a position Gandhi had articulated decades before, wrote that life “is the whole of which we are parts, and its other parts concern us for that reason. But the language of rights is rather ill-suited for expressing this.”

By March 1, Congress will have had to face the budget cuts mandated by the failure of the Simpson-Bowles commission to come up with a plan of deficit reduction that would satisfy both Republican and Democratic leaders. The failure to come up with such a plan pulled the “trigger” of a gun that is being held to the heads of poor and middle-class Americans. They will see draconian cuts in social services if the Democrats hold true to form and compromise with a Republican Party that puts defense spending and tax breaks for the rich over the interests of the majority of Americans. Predictably, Democrats undermined their own ability to pass legislation protecting the interests of the People over those of their corporate patrons. Having vowed to protect the social safety net, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid caved in to conservative Democrats who opposed serious filibuster reform and traded away the power to control the outcome of the latest round of the fight over how to avoid the fiscal cliff.

Now we have a situation where the majority of members of Congress on both sides of the aisle accept the fallacy that the only way out of the debt they created is to impose austerity measures that target Medicare and Social Security. These are the primary protections against the depredations of a system that puts the interests of the rich over those of ordinary citizens. Their proposed solution to the problem of their own making is to protect the wealthy individuals who fund their campaigns and neglect the needs of the people who actually elected them. While this strategy has provoked riots and international strikes in Europe, many Americans accept this as a sensible solution. They fail to understand some basic facts.

Members of Ohel Hachidusch gather for tree planting at their eco-kashrut garden in Gatow, Berlin. Credit: Brian Swarthout, March, 2012.

The many branches of Judaism confuse me and I dread being asked by non-Jews to explain what it means to be Reform or Conservative, let alone Renewal or Reconstructionist. I’ve looked up the definitions but they just don’t resonate with me. The affiliation of a synagogue means far less to me than the sense of community that comes from sharing Jewish rituals and traditions with friends and family.

But that sense of community can be hard to find, and when it does come, it can be at unexpected times and from unexpected sources. Before our family moved to Berlin in July of 2010, we had spent years debating the benefits of membership in our local synagogue. We were now eager to experience Jewish life in the country of our heritage. We planned to make our way through the city’s menu of Jewish congregations, never expecting to forge a close connection with any particular group.

“Muslims and non-Muslims should realize that we all are just travelers in this temporary world,” photojournalist Sadaf Syed tells me. She adds that we all should act on this realization “by opening up and getting to learn about each others faith, cultures, tradition.”

Photographer Sadaf Syed pays respect to the victims of 9/11 at Ground Zero in New York City.

Since she was two months old, Syed has traveled throughout the United States with her family, exposed to different cultures, religions, and people, including Muslims of different ethnicities. After picking up on many different customs and traditions, Syed became inspired to tell stories about this diverse group of Muslims.

Syed began her photography career with wedding photography and portraiture. Years later, her career shifted to amplifying the voices of people whose stories are seldom heard, giving them the chance to share their journeys, emotions, hopes, fears, abilities, and disabilities. As a visual storyteller, Syed is always looking for ways to inspire and educate people through her photography.

“You’re not a storyteller in words and writing, but you’re a storyteller visually, so you’re always looking to stimulate people visually,” she says.

In 2010, Syed, a Pakistani-Muslim, self-published iCOVER: A Day in the Life of a Muslim-American COVERed Girl, a book about Muslim women breaking stereotypes across the globe. The book features page after page of everyday Muslim women of different ethnicities and backgrounds, presenting photographs of them alongside captivating captions, quotes, and stories.

The personal is the political, has always struck me as incomplete. It was Teilhard de Chardin who first said “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The ‘personal is the political’ assumes an incomplete worldview, a cosmology of separation where the individual is forced to turn to the political as the end we seek – as though we were fundamentally political beings.

Grasping onto a worldview of connection, of interbeing, we hear nature whisper that we are fundamentally spiritual beings, quanta of spirit, mind and body, integrated. We weave our lives as spiders do their webs, out from ourselves and binding us to one another. Our fulfillment is in making these connections, in participating in a whole. That is what I see as spiritual politics: being accountable to the inescapable whole of which my life is just one of many, a unity masquerading as a diversity. When the personal is more than the political, when it is the sacred, I become whole.

I first heard of the horrific attacks on First Nations people by the Canadian government from Clyde Hall, a Shoshone elder. I had seen a few things on Facebook but I did not understand the potential to strip Canadian First Nations people of their sovereignty until Clyde laid it out in plain English. As he explained in detail the implications of the law that was on its way to passing in Canada, the danger of this legislation began to sink into my body. If this legislation passes, the Canadian government will cease to recognize First Nations treaty rights. The potential of which is that Canadian First Nations potentially could lose the rights to their land, among other things. Furthermore, ceasing to recognize the treaty rights of the First Nations is a move towards an erasure of indigenous identity and another attempt at genocide. If this legislation passes in Canada, it’s just a matter of time before this kind of legislation comes to the United States.

Native people across North America have been organizing a peaceful movement of resistance called “Idle No More”. A lot of my friends have been asking me, what is this movement about? Idle No More was founded by First Nations women and has gained significant momentum through the leadership of Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskit First Nation, who has been on a hunger strike since December 11, 2012. Her demand is that the Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Gov David Johnston meet with First Nations leaders to discuss treaty rights. The resistance is spreading like wildfire and I recently had the honor of joining with hundreds of First Nations people and their allies in Oakland for a Round Dance in solidarity with Chief Spence and Idle No More.

In the wake of the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, much has already been said and written about what a sympathetic character the freedom and democracy-lover was. There is now a citizen-led petition before the White House calling on President Obama to remove U.S. District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office. The petition, which has gathered 36,000 signatures so far, asserts that
“A prosecutor who does not understand proportionality and who regularly uses the threat of unjust and overreaching charges to extort plea bargains from defendants regardless of their guilt is a danger to the life and liberty of anyone who might cross her path.”

Aaron Swartz

The outpouring of public sympathy for Swartz is moving, especially in an era when large swaths of the American public are perfectly content to have vast amounts of information withheld from. So long as the trains are running on time, such a mentality goes, who cares if our own government is engaged in cyber wars and drone attacks with little oversight, and absolutely nothing in the way of public consent? That so many are honoring Aaron Swartz, and recognizing his noble aims for a more open society, is a heartening testament that at least some of us still believe there’s more to citizenship than showing up to the train platform at the right time. Yet the question must be asked: What about the victims of government persecution who aren’t so sympathetic?

Credit: Rick Reinhard

On an alarmingly milder-than-normal January day this year, about 100 religious leaders representing Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Islamic, Native American, Buddhist traditions gathered in the historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church before processing in a silent march two blocks to the north side of the White House for a “pray-in for the climate.” They were led by NASA scientist James Hansen, a leading climatologist on global warming who was carrying a small inflated globe, and a group of Buddhist drummers. They had just been commissioned by Common Cause CEO Bob Edgar, a former Congressman and Secretary General of the National Council of Churches.

Rev. Edgar spoke about his own conversion in that very church years ago as he listened to Dr. Martin Luther King just weeks before King was assassinated. Dr. King preached that “history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.” Edgar said his life changed upon hearing King’s words that day. This month, on the 84th anniversary of Dr. King’s birthday, Rev. Edgar reminded those in the pews that they are the leaders that they have been waiting for.

Did you ever think you would receive investment advice in a Tikkun publication? I have never come cross such advice here, but Tikkun was willing to entertain such an article because global warming is here. It is a very serious problem. The concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has risen 20% since 2000. The World Bank projects temperature increases of up to four degrees centigrade by 2100.

I became passionately interested in this issue twenty-five years ago. At that time I sold all the stocks in my IRA and reinvested the proceeds in alternative energy companies. Each year after that I have added to these holdings. Though the investments have not made me lots of money, I have been proud to own companies that are part of the solution. You might be interested in a similar investment strategy. What follows below are profiles of some of the best companies in the alternative energy space.

Medical insurers around the country are announcing a new round of double-digit premium increases, belying the promise that Obamacare would reduce costs of health care. Although the “Affordable” Health Care Act is not yet fully implemented, it is reasonable to assume that the further expansion of benefits will dwarf the promised savings as detailed in the error-filled CBO report Democrats use to justify the claim. The fact is that the ACA was never meant to be real health care reform, which can only be achieved through truly universal health care in the form of a single payer, Medicare-for-All model or something similar. What it amounts to is a taxpayer bailout of a failing medical insurance industry.