Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/5/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
Because we pick up on others emotions naturally, the empathic instinct of our nervous system can eventually become exhausted, whether we consciously or unconsciously engage in an act of empathy
Prison is where Harvey Weinstein should be, because, for one thing, there is zero guarantee that he will stop preying on women.
By reflecting on ourselves inwardly, we can see possibilities for the development of the world we inhabit with others as well.
If we have a foundation of these communication practices, we have the potential to find commonalities while also honoring differences; we don’t have to have the same experiences or identities in order to work together to make social change.
Los Angeles Black Worker Center (LABWC) and National Employment Law Project (NELP) demonstrates the need for California to explore expanded anti-employment discrimination to better protect workers in the era of Trump.
This is the text of a talk I gave on 21 October at Bioneers. It was followed by presentations by Cynthia Tom, a Bay Area-based visual artist, cultural curator, founder of A Place of Her Own, and Board President of the Asian American Women Artists Association and Lulani Arquette, President/CEO of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation (and Catalyst for Native Creative Potential on the National Cabinet of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture). As people entered the workshop, they heard a song called Familia, written by Cris and Israel Matos and performed by their band, Manicato, which Cynthia Tom manages. The message of the chorus sums it up: “Hey family, united we march without flags without borders but one voice.”
Let us begin. Every community owes its existence and vitality to generations from around the world who contributed their hopes, dreams, and energy to making the history that led to this moment.
I started this blog series exactly a month ago, saying I “borrowed the title of this series from a shrink who offered it as a way to call in the awareness and acknowledgement that start to diffuse reactivity. You know what I mean by reactivity? I’m talking about that rush of terror or fury or both that overwhelms brain and body when something pokes its finger into an old wound, flooding the inner world with elicited memory, elicited pain.”
Recently several friends have asked for my assessment of the general state of people as I observe them. I travel a good deal for speaking and consulting gigs and spend a lot of time connecting across distance in other ways, so responding to that query entails a quick mental survey of all I’ve seen in recent weeks. So far, my replies have begun with my own state of mind.
What’s most pressing for me is to hold in the foreground two realities simultaneously. One is the red alert danger of erupting violence leading to serious harm to people who are already vulnerable… The other is the commitment to humanize everyone, including the brutalizers.
I had a friend who in her youth acquired an elaborate multicolored tattoo spanning her stomach, a symmetrical image in which her navel served as a focal point. An eye? I no longer recall. She gave birth by Caesarean operation, and when the doctors stitched her back together, the two halves of the tattoo didn’t match up. As the years passed, the skew and pucker escalated.
However, unless we want to wake up at age 90 witnessing more of the same we must take a new and deeper look at this endless tension, anger, and hatred by too many whites toward too many non-white people.