Do you think the world is going to end in 2012?

I look over at the young Italian woman who asked the question, thinking she’s joking. But by the look in her eyes, I know she’s dead serious. And I can’t say I blame her, given our surroundings.

It’s one thing to dismiss the Mayan apocalypse myth from the safety of a coffeeshop-and-laptop in Oakland, but it’s another thing to hear it standing here on top of the pyramids of Tikal, the heart of the ancient Mayan empire.

It’s December 2011 – exactly one year before my boy Ronnie keeps telling me the Mayan calendar is going to run out and life as we know it will cease to exist (Yo, that shit is real, son! I’m telling you!) - and I find myself deep in the jungle of northern Guatemala.

Dear President Obama and Democratic Members of Congress,

I invite you to embrace the radical notion that there are fundamental truths and values that the vast majority of US citizens believe in and support. They have chosen you to be the messenger and implementer of those ideas in the form of legislation and actions on a federal level. Now is the time for you to step out of a politics based on fear and limiting beliefs and into the very real possibility and actuality that when you choose to stand in a politics of love, your actions will be celebrated.

This is what a politics of love looks like:

1. Genuine care for the well-being of all, both in the US and abroad.

2. A commitment to the repair of our planet, food and water resources.

3. A belief in the sacred nature of every being.

The vast majority of citizens as evidenced by the occupy movement, votes at the polls, and public discourse, are tired by the politics of hate, fear and money that dominated the 2012 election and our public discourse for years. Instead of a politics of fear, hatred and money, they are yearning for a politics based on love – where the well-being of all overrides the desire of a few.

Hurricane Sandy: An Island in Mourning and Crisis

Day 5, after Hurricane Sandy hit, I dreamt about my three birds – a cockatiel, and two parrots-creatures from other lands, displaced and domesticated to live in cages in artificially constructed human-made environments.

Two of these birds died over the past two years – the parrots. In my dream, we are in my garage. The birdcage and the garage door are open. It’s a dangerous combination. Only one bird (the living one), a bright yellow cockatiel, perches in an open cage. I fear he will fly out and away – into the cold and die. Just then, my daughter runs past and opens and runs through a door that leads into the house. The cockatiel flies after my daughter and into safety. Relief. I turn back to the cage and see the other two birds who, in ‘waking life’, are dead. They perch on top of the open cage. They don’t fly away. Elated, I call out to my ex-husband: “They are here, they are here.” I go to the parrots – one bright green, and the other orange and yellow like the sun, and carry them back into the house, into safety.

We are home.

I wake up from this dream in the dark, cold, and early morning. As I wake more fully, my sense of comfort falls away. I remember: We are not home, my ex-husband is not with us, and the two birds I just carried into safety are dead.

Indiana Rally for the Right to Know. Credit: Creative Commons/ MillionsAgainstMonsanato

For several months, there’s been heated controversy in California over Proposition 37, a ballot initiative that would require labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods in that state. Not surprisingly, Monsanto, Du Pont, and the other manufacturers of these novel products — joined by major corporations like Pepsi and General Mills whose products contain ingredients derived from them — have committed tens of millions of dollars to a massive advertising campaign to defeat this measure. Equally unsurprising, these ads contain several distortions and are highly deceptive. But what has surprised many people is the fact that the American Association for the Advancement of Science also decided to lend its weight to the anti-labeling campaign. On October 20, the association’s Board of Directors issued a statement concluding that mandatory labeling of GM foods “can only serve to mislead and falsely alarm consumers.” But what’s truly misleading is the purportedly science-based statement that’s supposed to support this conclusion. Following is the open letter I’ve sent to the Board pointing out the main falsehoods in their statement and demanding that they retract them and set the record straight

An Open Letter to the Board of Directors
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Retract the Misrepresentations in Your Statement About Genetically Modified Foods

Although your statement of 20 October 2012 in opposition to the labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods professes to speak with scientific authority, it contains a number of false assertions in an attempt to portray them as safe. Because this statement was obviously intended to defeat a California ballot initiative that would require labeling of GM foods in that state, it’s important that you take steps to cure the confusion you’ve caused by acknowledging your errors and setting the record straight.

The following paragraphs describe the misrepresentations that must be rectified – and provide the actual facts.

Hurricane Sandy Image c/o Huffington Post

This month has been one of personal, professional, and national shifts, storms, and graces. So much so that I can think of no better way to represent this conflux than by sharing my “sermonette” from last night’s worship service in my young adult ministry program.

In the last 30 days I turned 33, I found some beautiful progress and graces in the world of my ministry work, and struggled at a distance with the pain and tragedy of my home state, New Jersey and our neighboring adjacent-hometown of New York City. I spent my life, at different points, wandering the coastline of the Jersey Shore during summer vacation, hopping through the subway and wandering around the Lower East Side when I cut school as a high schooler (oops!) to sitting in Washington Square Park in between graduate school classes at NYU. Now my middle school in Summit, NJ is a “heating station” and crisis center, the YMCA is where mass showers are being taken, and no one is hopping on the subway to anywhere.

From my personal heart to yours I share the “sermonette” I gave last night to my spiritual seekers in Delray Beach. Blessings and prayers to all who suffer and are lost–in this tragedy and in the world at large. This essay was written for all of you.

“You don’t hit bottom,” says an old 12-step adage, “until you stop digging.” In other words: no bad experience, painful consequence, or downright awful time in and of itself will lead people to change. When we are thoughtless, reckless, destructively selfish, or blind to the effects of our actions on ourselves and others – and when all this leads in a Very Bad Direction, we can still hold on to the negative habits and damaging behavior. We can always close our eyes, turn our backs, and deny, deny, deny.

Hurricane Sandy – a mega, super, Franken storm – is a case in point. I would very much like it to be a cliché that such storms, predictable aspects of global climate change, are what our current use of fossil fuels is getting us; and that therefore our political, economic, technological, educational, and spiritual leaders are doing everything in their power to help us change our ways.

But the sad truth is that outside of the still comparatively limited environmental community, and the occasional policy nod towards “maybe doing something serious at some point,” our leaders are pretty much ignoring reality. Yes Bill McKibben and 350.org, the Sierra Club and the odd religious leader, are beating the band. A few minor politicians here and there are doing their best. The odd editorial in the Times or upset piece in a progressive magazine appears.

Perhaps the most generous teaching of the God or Spiritual Reality of the Universe comes in the second paragraph of the Shma prayer (in Deuteronomy), where it tells us that if we do not create a world based on love, kindness, generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, social justice, and peace then the world itself will not work, and there will be an environmental catastrophe and humans and all other animals are in danger of perishing.

These are not the words of an angry patriarch threatening to do this to us, but rather a kind warning that the universe is sending us–a warning that tells us that the ethical and the physical are intrinsically bound together in such a way that when we build a society based on greed, selfishness, materialism, and endless consumption without regard to the consequences for the earth, disaster will follow.

Growing up, I thought this an extravagant and foolish claim tied to an authoritarian, patriarchal, and judgmental god in whom I could not believe; but as an adult I encountered environmental science and learned that it was all true. There are now a host of books that show the concrete steps that lead from ethical irresponsibility toward the earth and toward each other to the resulting environmental crisis (and we regularly review them in Tikkun magazine).

Hurricane Sandy is only the latest manifestation of this truth, and compared with what is coming, a relatively mild reminder. Bill McKibben, who often writes about these issues in Tikkun, recently discussed Hurricane Sandy and climate disaster with Amy Goodman and climate scientist Greg Jones. It’s very well worth your time to listen to it. Here’s an excerpt:

I’m a little concerned at the particular way in which we’ve all been watching the news, trolling every weather site for new photos and videos of sensational storm coverage. Though initially it comes from a place of concern and awareness, it can also border on selfish– as if we’re using serious damage and danger for entertainment. I know it’s “exciting” to be in the middle of things—I felt the same way, with the whole country’s attention on New York (to which I’ve recently relocated)… Receiving text messages and emails of concern every five minutes from friends and family around the world is actually quite touching, and shows genuine care in a way that we don’t often grant one another.

But when I step back and check myself, I realize that to continue watching dramatic mass-media news from a place of fascinated pornographic greed seems excessive, wrong, and unjust. As if we’re doing “our part” by gluing our eyes to the weather channel and marveling the destruction. Why did nobody (including me) pay this level of attention– or even know– when Sandy hit Cuba (see photo below)? And where are the practical articles telling us what we can do to help with the relief efforts, or how we can raise awareness about climate change and extreme weather for the upcoming elections?

There are important lessons to be learned from this type of extreme weather. For one thing, nature is not a force to be reckoned with. It’s been a long time since the phrase “climate change” has appeared on the national stage, but maybe it’s time to reignite discussions? With the recent presidential debates completely skipping over the topic, and no mention of it in the otherwise robust news coverage of the hurricane, I wonder how we went from being climate-obsessed to climate-indifferent?

A tough question, this one. Certainly there are a number of responses which are not particularly spiritual, as tempting as they might be. For if we think of spirituality as the simple but extraordinarily difficult attempt to respond to life’s difficulties with mindfulness, equanimity, gratitude, compassion, and love, then the natural tendency towards revulsion at the lies, panic at the thought of the “other guy” winning, or contempt for the stupidity of the confused citizens who might vote against our candidate – well, such responses don’t really fit the bill.

Nor, sad to say, does the religious understanding of one candidate being absolutely closer to God’s commands than the other. And this is equally as true for conservatives as it is for liberals: for those who are sure that Romney will keep the faith for religious freedom, heterosexuality, fetus rights, and a strong military; as for voters who believe Obama serves the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount far better than any Republican could ever do.

What I’m looking for is a spiritual response that can coexist with very different political views; providing, of course, that the different political views don’t depend on outright group hatred, violent aggression, or brute selfishness. Given that condition, I believe it is possible for people of spiritual good will to disagree about (for example) tax policy, responses to conflicts in the Middle East, energy policy, and even abortion rights. (And I say this as someone with highly defined politics, views so far to the left I fall off the planet occasionally.) Such spirituality is compatible with organized religion, with no religion, with reverence for God, goddesses, spirits, nature, or simply life.

This Saturday, October 20, 2012, at 2:00 p.m. in New York City, Living Downstream, the film based on Sandra Steingraber’s stunning book of the same name–will have it’s premiere in New York City at Lincoln Center’s Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center. It will have its broadcast premiere in November on Outside Television.

Living Downstream follows in the tradition of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking, Silent Spring (1962). Indeed, Steingraber has been dubbed by many as a modern-day “Rachel Carson.”