Demonstrators and clergy carrying a golden calf in the shape of a Wall Street bull march from Judson Memorial Church to Zuccotti Park on Sunday, October 9, 2011. / Tom Martinez and Dennis Hearn

The local chapter of NSP in Washington, D.C. has been involved in creating an alternative to the standard conservative prayer breakfast that takes place each year, and we are inviting you to do the same in your community. We’ve been working with Occupy Faith D.C. to create “the People’s Prayer Breakfast.” You can do the same in your area of the country. It doesn’t have to be this week – take your time and make sure you do outreach to Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Ba’hai, Sikh, Wicca, Buddhist, Quaker, Unitarian, Religious Science, and all other possible communities of faith to get them involved in the planning.

Between January 9-13, I taught an ethics course called “Resilience and Resistance” at Starr King School for the Ministry, a member school of the Graduate Theological Union. Eleven faith leaders of multiple religious traditions explored life stressors, historical trauma, and health in the context of oppression, white supremacy and social movements. Through rigorous study, dialogue and spiritual reflection, the students analyzed and interrogated the historical and cultural dynamics of stress and resilience, hoping to identify contextual factors and healthy strategies and promote cultures of resistance in their ministries and activism. Course readings, guest presentations, and class discussion drew heavily from the scholarship from and lessons learned through movements led by people of color and poor/working class people. A website designed for the course will make available to the public some of the student’s final projects and begin a collection of web resources designed by seminarians for faith leaders involved seeking social justice.

Opportunities for praxis (reflection-and-action as an emancipatory component of education) were crucial to the course. One Phoenix-based Master of Divinity student, Nastasha Ostrom, spent her time applying her street medic skills and interest in resilience/resistance to Occupy Oakland. Her reflections show a piece of what self-care looks like in the context of protest, state violence, and community activism. As Occupy Oakland experienced yet another wave of police brutality, and arrests, as well as solidarity from various other cities’ demonstrations this past weekend, Ostrom’s insights seem increasingly relevant in the public dialogue about caring for each other in the faith-full struggle for social justice.

The old frog leaps

Into the silent pool

Splash!

-Basho

Everyone from childhood is familiar with the story line of the Ten Plagues. We are familiar with them from childhood because they are almost amusing. God smites the fierce Egyptian people not with Godzilla and King Kong, but with bugs, hail, and frogs. Frogs! At any rate, it is hard to envision just what kind of ‘plague’ throwing frogs around might be. Other than some minor damage to agriculture, they aren’t particularly pesky little fellas. So our goal is to discover what other meanings may be inherent in this plague of frogs.

Before thinking about the relationship between animals and plagues, perhaps it might be valuable to the relationship between animals and us, or the concept of animality, in general. The initial impulse would be to try find the Freudian frog, situate frog symbolism in some sort of psychoanalytic way. The frog would follow the the horse in the manner of Freud’s Little Hans case; the reaction of the child to the mistreatment and death of the horse would be understood as ‘really’ referring to underlying drives. Or the wolf, in the Wolfman case, which wasn’t about wolves at all but about castration. Thus we would have to find some neurotic process which could be adequately symbolized by a frog. In the classical psychoanalytic viewpoint, then, interpreting the frog would be interpreting some signified process or drive in man, but would have very little to do with the actual frog or ‘frogness’.

Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative reading in these cases. They argue that there is a more immediate relation to animality that is more than just a signifier for an unconscious drive. Here is their dissension from Freud:

‘The horses blinders are the father’s eyeglasses, the black around its mouth is his moustache, its kicks are the parents’ ‘lovemaking’. Not one word about Hans’s relation to the street, on how the street was forbidden to him, on what it is for a child to see the spectacle ‘a horse is proud, a blinded horse pulls, a horse falls, a horse is whipped” Psychoanalysis has no feeling for unnatural participations’

Deleuze and Guattari postulate that the relationship to animals is that of an ‘assemblage’, that is, a structuralist construct whereby aspects of animal behaviour are abstracted and incorporated into the individuals being. Their language is wonderful and thus hard to summarize, a summary would sound something like: the individual’s abstract machine (abstract here being a verb, that is, the person unconstructs the actual thing observed and takes from it certain structures and relations) reconstructing for themselves a Body Without Organs, these new behaviours would become lines of flight, deterritorializations. This appropriation they call the ‘becoming-animal’. When an actor barks like a dog, he is not metamorphosizing into a dog, or trying to, rather, he is taking on to himself an abstracted characteristic of dogs. This process is identical to other becomings, such as the ‘becoming-woman’. Images and stereotypes of what woman means are what are assumed by the individual who ‘becomes-woman’. Becoming woman is not imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it… The child does not become the adult any more than the girl becomes a woman; the girl is the becoming-woman of each sex, just at the child is the becoming-young of every age…

This analysis leads in several interesting directions, for example, they point out that these becomings tend to be of minorities, there is less becoming-man than there is becoming-woman, or becoming-Black or becoming-Jew. These becomings, since they are by nature acts of reterritorialization, tend to relate to ‘minoritarian’ processes. Thus:

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.

Several hundred participants turned up as early as 6:00 AM this morning to participate in San Francisco’s Occupy the Courts action. The event was part of a nationwide protest to mark the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which granted corporations unlimited spending power via political action committees. As South Carolina prepares to vote in the 2012 Republican primary, the topic is a timely one.

I spoke with a longstanding member of Occupy San Francisco, an elderly woman who lived in the city’s first encampments. We stood in line as volunteers handed out hot meals to protestors, the site cleverly situated in front of Market Street’s (Food) Bank of America.” When asked about the next steps for the Occupy movement, she emphasized that the focus needs to shift toward communities. “We have to occupy our neighborhoods,” she explained, “breaking into smaller groups and fighting for local issues.” Occupy activists, she argued, are probably already experts at local politics, but they need to be take more control over their communities.

Whether this approach would work is difficult to say. As Ira Katznelson revealed in City Trenches, decentralization may lend the appearance of community empowerment, but its goal is often a placatory one. One of Occupy’s strengths has been its relentless attack on corporate greed and federal incompetence; a shift to local politics would fail to address these systemic issues.

The two of us – the woman preferred to remain anonymous – also discussed criticism by the media. “The media has a twentieth-century understanding of protest,” she remarked. “I don’t think anyone knows yet what modern protest looks like.”

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!

I’m fairly certain that, as you read this sentence, you match a certain demographic. In fact, I can say with 100 percent confidence that you do. You are an Internet user and, by virtue of this fact, should be filled with tremendous outrage at the legislation that is set to pass in Congress.

The “Stop Online Piracy Act” (HR 3261), introduced in October, empowers copyright holders to seek punitive action when their material is reproduced online. Fair enough. But like much of the cleverly-worded legislation presented to Congress, this bill’s title is hardly reflective of its likely pernicious effect. (Remember Bush’s “Clean Air Act”?) What SOPA really amounts to is a destabilization of the Internet by corporate entities.

As a member of the self-identified “slash profession” – writer/organizer/educator/whatever pays the rent that month – I have learned how to wear multiple hats. How to move between different worlds and code-switch my headgear to meet a particular place and community. Alright, I got this big event coming up tonight…should I wear the Kangol, the fitted, or the yarmulke? (Correct answer: all three.) Sometimes, though, it’s a struggle figuring out which slash to bring out in which situation. Take Occupy.

I got back in Oakland full-time last month, and immediately jumped into the beautiful chaos that is Occupy Oakland. I joined the big West Coast port shutdown on December 12, started attending the alternatively powerful and painful General Assemblies, and connected with the two committees I’ve begun organizing with, Occupy the Hood and Labor Solidarity. It’s been great, and I’ve gotten to stretch some of activist muscles that I hadn’t used in years. (Sometimes literally – holding one side of a 30″ banner with that wind whipping off the bay is harder than it looks.) But while I’ve been bringing my organizing and education experience to the table, sometimes I leave behind the thing I do that I’m doing right now on this laptop. Writing. Telling stories. Creating culture.

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.

Vodun practitioners from all over the African Diaspora traveled to Benin (formerly Dahomey), the birthplace of the religion, this week to participate in what is known as International Voodoo Day. This January 10 festival of prayers, libations, sacrifices and other rituals is the most important Vodun gathering in the world.

As a Haitian-American, I can’t help reflect on this most African part of our heritage in the New World especially as it is continually maligned by those whose knowledge is restricted to popular images that favor the macabre. Those of us who recognize and respect Vodou’s complexity know we must defend it because the religion remains trapped in stereotypes making it extremely difficult to dispel geopolitically driven myths too entrenched in the spectacular.

Growing up as a child in Haiti, I had no concept of what is referred to as “Voodoo” in the U.S. In fact, the more appropriate word, Vodou, was not part of my vocabulary. The tradition that some members of my family followed was known as “serving the spirits.” Even that phrase was not something we actively used, since our actual engagement was rooted more in daily practice than naming. Serving meant living in a world where the sacred and secular were blurred. So it was commonplace to see adults pour libations of water and coffee three times onto the ground upon awakening in the morning before even speaking to one another. Or sometimes they rushed to the outhouse, I would learn later, to expunge bad dreams that should not be spoken in order to deflect their mal-intention and prevent entry into the home. These and other very conscious acts of psychic repulsion taught me that serving the spirits was foremost about communion and protection.

At first, the numbers were clear to me. There was the 1% of the population, and there were the 99%. The division was based on income and on assets. The 1% made 20.3% of the income in 2006, averaging $1,243,516. They owned 34.6% of total assets in 2007 and 42.7% of total financial assets. The 99% was everyone else. This picture, upsetting as it is, made some sense to me.

Then it got muddied.

Because the bottom salary of the 1% starts at $382,593. So, doesn’t that mean that some of the 99% actually make extremely comfortable income. Then are they still part of the 99%? Hmmm… Something in that picture doesn’t quite capture the depth of an experience of injustice and powerlessness that I read into the expression “We are the 99%.” So what to do? Is it really 99%, or is it only 90%?

Hillel Schenker

Sadly, the lack of progress toward a two-state solution is creating a backlash among some Palestinians who are now turning against dialogue and cooperation with dovish Israelis. An article in Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper, published on Dec. 30– “Don’t let them shut down discussion” by Hillel Schenker, co-editor of the Palestine-Israel Journal– tells the tale. Here are highlights:

…. [T]he Palestine-Israel Journal, the quarterly I co-edit, was obliged to postpone a public conference we were organizing at an East Jerusalem hotel … due to pressure on Palestinian speakers and threats against the hotel owner. …
A news item … earlier in the week stated that the Fatah leadership had decided to halt all unofficial Palestinian-Israeli meetings due to … Prime Minister’s Netanyahu’s insistence on continuing settlement expansion. Unnamed Palestinian officials were quoted claiming that Israel exploits such meetings in order to tell the world that a dialogue is taking place between the two peoples, and that it is only the Palestinian Authority that refuses to sit down at the negotiating table.
This seems like a parallel to the familiar criticism of such meetings by right-wing Israelis, who accuse Israeli participants of being concerned only about Palestinian rights, as opposed to Israeli security needs. Suffice it to recall recent campaigns by NGO Monitor, Im Tirzu and others against Israeli peace, human rights and civil liberties NGOs….
What was so threatening about a conference at which Israelis and Palestinians were going to discuss the potential impact of the Arab world’s uprising, whose speakers were to include Ron Pundak, co-chair of the Palestinian-Israeli Peace NGO Forum, and Khalil Shikaki, the renowned Palestinian public-opinion specialist?

Free food at Occupy Oakland. / Photo Courtesy of Wendy Kenin

The messages we take from the stories of homeless people, veterans, women, indigenous peoples, and volunteers involved with Occupy Wall Street demonstrate the keen effectiveness and high spiritual status of the international movement. These points of hope are proof of the positive impact the Occupy movement is having.

Some of the real-life people featured in the television series, "All American Muslim." / Photo Courtesy of TLC

Next Sunday is the last installment of All American Muslim, the reality television series on TLC that was the target of fringe, anti-Muslim hate rhetoric. The show introduced five Muslim-American families to the reality TV audience– two groups who would not, in all likelihood, have otherwise met. As it turns out, these five families are not shills for radical extremists. They are not hiding sinister plots, surreptitiously trying to turn American law into Sharia law, lulling America into a false sense of security by showing a few “good Muslims.”

These families are the real Muslims. They are folks from Dearborn, Michigan, where the show takes place, who struggle to raise their families to the best of their abilities. Some wear headscarves; others wear tattoos. They suffered through 9/11 alongside us, and they decry those who hijack Islam in the name of terrorism. They, it turns out, are just like us, and that is the reality that the fringe groups who called for advertisers to boycott the program, cannot tolerate.

The mother of the Yiddish song and language revival, Adrienne Cooper, has left us suddenly and entirely too soon. I knew her slightly, seeing her sometimes at social events, organizational meetings and performances. On occasion I’d see her on the street or even in a parking garage.

She was always cordial, even when an article of mine angered some colleagues, and she went out of her way to reassure me that I was still welcome. She even thanked me for the “free publicity.”

And then there was her voice, her scholarship and her activism, perhaps more cultural than political. She made a choice to devote her professional life to Yiddish and Yiddish song, rather than American history, in which she nearly completed a doctorate. Highlights of her career included about a decade each in important executive positions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, and in the Workmens Circle/Arbeiter Ring, a longstanding cultural and fraternal organization with a legacy of social democratic and labor union activism. I last saw her at a Passover “model seder” she presided over for the Workmens Circle, a traditional event that I used to attend with my retired parents in the South Florida chapter years ago. We had no inkling of her illness, a rare and vicious cancer that was difficult to diagnose–a diagnosis she didn’t receive until July.

A mosque in Dearborn, MI attended by members of the reality TV show, "All American Muslim." / Photo Courtesy of TLC

We are community leaders from the three Abrahamic faiths who don’t normally look to reality TV to teach lessons of faith and religious freedom. But TLC’s new show, All American Muslim, is doing just that. It’s also come under recent attack from Islamophobic extremists who seem to have forgotten the values on which this country was founded. Rather than tune out in protest, as Americans, it’s time to tune in.

Over years of writing and blogging, I’ve been refining this message that I take from a holiday that I love. Other bloggers here have also provided their insights, but I like mine for its relative brevity:

History is of necessity an interpretive process, and these interpretations often spawn self-serving myths. National myths are not usually complete fabrications, but they tend to romanticize and sanitize real events.

The traditional Hanukkah story is a source of pride for the Jewish people. We are taught that a small army of freedom fighters, the Maccabees, led by the heroic priestly family of Mattathias and his seven sons, successfully resisted the cruel pagan tyranny of the ancient Greco-Syrian Seleucid dynasty. This is not untrue, but it’s only part of the story. We are usually not taught the far more complex reality that the Maccabean war of liberation was also a civil war between rural “fundamentalist” religious adherents of the old order and the more educated and cosmopolitan Hellenized Jews of the city, who voluntarily and eagerly embraced the Greek culture of the Syrian empire. The Maccabees surely killed many of these “liberal” Jews in their struggle.

Photo Courtesy of Len Radin

When our children were little and pressed their outsider noses against the lighted shop windows of Christmas, I decided we’d celebrate Hanukah. I wasn’t delighted that it commemorated a military event instead of “peace on earth,” but the children could join the season’s merry-making.

Also, the tale of Maccabean rebellion is embedded with legendry appealing to children. The rag-tag Maccabees’ incredible victory over a mighty state, the cleansing and rededication of the great Jerusalem temple, the radiant image of a one day oil-lamp, miraculously glowing for eight days. So, I plunged into candle-lit monorahs, dreidles, fried potato pancakes (latkes), small gifts, and a child’s Hanukah story.

Nothing could be less celebratory than having to celebrate. Imagine someone holding a gun to your head: “Sing Christmas carols! And sing like you mean it!” Where does celebration come from? What does it mean? I’m inclined to think that any word connected to “celebrity” has to be suspect. 

The dictionary, source of so much wisdom, tells me something unexpected: “to perform with appropriate rites and ceremonies; solemnize, observe, commemorate, sound the praises of, make known publicly.” No wonder we can feel it’s a heavy burden. Appropriate rites: like holiday cards, Christmas trees, and end-of-year letters. I’m happy to observe and commemorate, but solemnize?

By Lourdes Cardenal (Own work)

In the mall culture, Christmas is light as a snowflake, but some part of it is heavy, as heavy as labor, a forced journey while you’re nine months pregnant, on a donkey yet. And what’s the journey for? To pay taxes. Then the hotels are all full. Joseph must have cursed a blue streak and Mary felt the floor drop out, facing her first labor far from home, from a midwife, from her mother.

James Mitchell / CC

Regardless of the dissembling of corporate state propagandists, free market capitalism has always been a government subsidized, bubble-inflating, swindlers’ game, in which, psychopathic personalities (not “job creators” but con job perpetrators) thrive. By the exploitation of the many, a ruthless few have amassed large amounts of capital by which they dominate mainstream narratives and compromise elected and governmental officials, thereby gaming the system for their benefit.

Historically, the system has proven so demeaning to the majority of the population that the elite, from time to time, have, as a last resort, due to fear of a popular uprising, introduced a bit of socialism into the system, allowing a modicum of swag to funnel downward, and, as a result, the ranks of the middle class have been expanded. For a time, the bourgeoisie are bamboozled by the sales pitch that one day they will be affluent enough to be freed from the taxing obligations of a dismal, debt-beholden existence, when, in fact, they sowed their fate (like those swindled by opening their bank accounts after receiving email from parties claiming to be momentarily cash-strapped Nigerian royalty) by their own greed i.e. by their self-imprisonment within their own narrow, self-serving view of existence.