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.”

The world is abuzz with the ongoing fallout of the Arab Spring, while the Occupy movement still reverberates in the US. But what endures from Israel’s less-noted summer months of street protest for social justice? I’m going to review what I’ve learned in recent months and project forward.

Protest leader, Daphni Leef

First of all, street protests continue, including a clash in recent days with police over the removal of protest tents; but these activists are in the hundreds rather than the tens and hundreds of thousands who rallied peaceably during the summer. Still, the structure I reported on for In These Times magazine, continues to operate, with the movement attempting “to carry itself beyond the streets”:

…. Alongside “general assembly” meetings in parks, neighborhood committees have been formed around the country, as well as advisory committees comprised of prominent personalities from Israel’s diverse ethnic and religious communities.

By any estimation, Israel’s summer of protest was an impressive display of progressive social activism, rallying nearly half a million protesters (out of Israel’s seven million population) into the streets at its high-water mark on September 3rd. More than one hundred tent encampments for social justice dotted the entire country. It united Arabs in Jaffa (at least rhetorically) with traditional working class Likud and Shas supporters in the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Hatikva. (See this YouTube video of the great liberal Orthodox activist, Leah Shakdiel, speaking on this unifying theme at the Yerucham protest.)

A handful of images from Occupy Oakland’s general strike on Nov. 2 have already become iconic: aerial photos of people streaming up a bridge to shut down the Port of Oakland, the silhouettes of protesters standing atop a railroad scaffold at dusk, a masked protester shattering a window of a Wells Fargo bank, and the flaming garbage heap around which confrontations with the police occurred during the night. Though an abundance of other images are being posted and shared by protesters, these startling, dramatic scenes captured by photojournalists have become a favorite pick for news outlets looking for an attention-grabbing image.

Most of these sensational photos were not taken from the perspective of the mass of people who participated in the day’s protests. They were taken by news helicopters or by photographers who spent the day shadowing masked protesters in hopes of a perfect shot of breaking glass. They fail to convey a central embodied experience of the day: the intense sense of connection, warmth, and engagement experienced by the people who participated in the day’s mass nonviolent actions.

The photo essay below offers a vision of the general strike from the ground, from the perspective of participants who were listening to speeches in the plaza, chanting in the streets, and marching en masse to the port.

Flickr/David Shankbone

by Donna Schaper

Washington Square Park filled up like a great bellows Saturday night with intense energy from the Times Square action joining some New York University energy. The bellows filled and then they emptied, right before midnight in a peaceful march exiting the park through the South. Not every one left and some were arrested. At 12:15 a.m the picture of the park wearing a necklace of navy blue was disconcerting, to say the least. “The park is empty,” the police announced. There is nothing pretty about that gorgeous vital thriving park being empty. Police on horses went through. Some imagined that the park was secured.

About a dozen Judson members and community ministers gathered to open part of our building as a comfort station for both police and protesters. We found out the action was happening about 6 p.m. on Saturday. We prayed in our own ways that the larger cause of economic justice in the movement not become a police/community brawl. Last night’s event – in the wake of the Times Square protests which resulted in dozens of arrests – got very close to changing the conversation off economic injury and injustice into a confrontation of “people power” and “police power.”

by Paul Glover

For ninety-nine years the campaign for universal health coverage has relied on conferences, panel discussions, petitions, and rallies. These vent moral indignation but lack power.  Today, 51 million Americans without medical insurance and 30 million Americans paying for inadequate coverage will not get prompt affordable health care through polite legal means.

That’s because Congress and insurance companies are now significantly owned by multinational investment firms. Thus policy is made in remote boardrooms that maximize profit and minimize people. These stuffed suits and their puppets have no concern for suffering Americans, slick advertisements notwithstanding.

Therefore, to take effective control of medical care, the uninsured and our allies have begun organizing to damage the profitability of insurance investments, while building a new American health system.

The League of Uninsured Voters (LUV) embraces the American tradition of rowdy confrontation that ended slavery, gained votes for women, won the eight-hour workday, pressed for social security, demanded civil rights, secured AIDS funding, and established the nation.

Through LUV, we uninsured take leadership to expand Medicare to all. Liberal campaigns need our initiative, because moral indignation is less powerful than desperation. Richard Kirsch, director of Health Care for America Now said, “We would never want to organize the uninsured by themselves because Americans see the problem as affordability,” according to an AP news article. We 50 million uninsured, though, see the problem as life-or-death.

Mother's Day Cake (photo by Xurble/Gareth Simpson)

When I was younger I feared becoming my mother. I saw her foibles without really seeing either her strengths or graces, and from time to time, when I caught sight of those foibles in myself, I thought, “Oh darn. I am becoming my mother.” (Well, I thought something stronger than that. But this is a public blog.)

Then, this morning, I caught myself talking to our cats as I got out of the shower. A little context may be helpful here: my mother has lived alone for most of the years since I went to college, which is longer ago than I care to admit. And I know she has talked to her cats all that time since she did it when I lived at home and she still does it now. And while I have a partner, my partner has been in Africa for more than four months and so for all intents and purposes I live alone right now – for another week anyway, till she comes home. So I watched myself have a conversation with the cats and I thought: I am becoming my mother. But without the expletive. And with a sense of gratefulness. So I thought it was time, in honor of Mother’s Day tomorrow, to give thanks for some of the ways that I am becoming my mother.

The fires of democracy continue to burn brightly in Wisconsin.

With a Smile, Photo by Rebecca Congo

Recall campaigns are racing along, and a recent community meeting in Milwaukee, usually a sleepy, ill-attended affair, boasted several hundred attendants. When their representative, Chris Larson, one of the “Wisconsin 14″ showed up, they jumped to their feet in a standing ovation. Neighborhood listservs are boiling with activity.

Photo of and by Rebecca Congo+Friend

On Facebook and in a thousand union and church meetings, people solidify their connections with each other and their commitment to recover and strengthen our precious democracy.

Meaningful Individual Acts, Meaningful Collective Acts

April 4^th and 5^th, there were dozens of opportunities to participate in democracy both publicly and privately. At least five activities were planned for the South Bay (Please comment and post photos if you attended one of these.)

An article by Daniel Ming and Aaron Glantz in yesterday’s (San Francisco) Bay Citizen, also in the New York Times Bay Area edition:

A Jewish Group Makes Waves, Locally and Abroad

Some Bay Area activists hope a new Egyptian government will lead to an end of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories

Hundreds of people, mostly Arab-Americans, are expected to gather Saturday in downtown San Francisco to support anti-government protests in Egypt, and a large contingent of Jews representing a Bay Area peace-advocacy group will join them, one of its leaders says.

“We are deeply inspired by their push for democracy and freedom,” said Cecilie Surasky, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, based in Oakland….

The unrest in Egypt is merely the latest issue to pit a number of Bay Area activists against prominent Jewish organizations, as well as against some Israelis who have come to see the Bay Area as a locus for Jewish opposition to Israel’s government….

The divisions have heightened tensions among Bay Area Jews. During one altercation last year, a pro-Israel activist attacked two representatives of Jewish Voice for Peace with pepper spray. Last March, Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun, a bimonthly Jewish magazine based in Berkeley, received death threats, and his home was plastered with signs accusing him of “Islamo-Fascism,” after he announced that he planned to give an award to a United Nations official who led an investigation into Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza.

And if you are in the Bay Area come to our 25th Anniversary celebration when we will give six people including that official, Judge Richard Goldstone, the Tikkun Award! We’re happy that they picked up on this as well:

“[Social media] makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”

This provocative assertion was made by Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker piece, “Small Change,” published earlier this month.

To sum it up quickly, Gladwell’s article is centered around what kind of activism social-media outlets are really motivating. Specifically, he talks about Twitter and Facebook, and omits -though it is public knowledge- that he doesn’t use and doesn’t like Twitter. But we’ll let that slide. The article first relates the story of four African-Americans who, in 1960, were refused service at a restaurant in Greensboro, NC, for having sat down on seats that were reserved for “white people.” The episode sparked a massive and violent student protest which “became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade – and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.”

By the end of the article you’ll see that he clearly thinks that Internet-based social activism is effective only when it requires 1) less effort, 2) less personal involvement, and 3) less hierarchical organization than when it does not. Following this logic, we could say that it’s easy to retweet someone else’s message about a rally happening somewhere, and it’s easy to like it on Facebook and say you will be attending the event, but when it comes to actually making phone calls, and printing out flyers, and organizing meetings, or putting our personal freedom at risk, our motivation to participate quickly fades. Problem is, Gladwell explains, that real, radical social movements have always required high-risk actions and close ties among their members, not to mention a strong organizational component. Gladwell concludes that social media today is useful only for small-scale, low-involvement social participation.

Several social-media critics have responded toGladwell’s claims, includingTwitter co-founder Biz Stone himself. Most of them disagree with Gladwell’s assessment. Some smart readers do too.They criticize Gladwell for making an unfair comparison between “Twitter activism” and the Civil Rights Movement, and they say that Gladwell is making a big mistake by dismissing the entire spectre of possibilities of social networking. His view, they say, is anachronistic and unrealistic. The world doesn’t function and doesn’t organize itself the same way it did in the 60s. The enemies are different. So are the players.

Why is there an olive on the Seder plate? Why is there an orange on the seder plate? And how can the liberation story of Passover relate to our modern-day struggles against oppression? Traditional Passover haggadot (the books of readings used at seder services) are full of answers but not to these questions. But then again, most seder plates don’t have olives and oranges on them …

I’m always interested in efforts to reclaim, reinvent, or renew religious holidays in ways that make them newly sustaining and politically energizing, so I was excited to learn through my friend Traci of a radical, anti-racist haggadah full of poetic writing and ideas about how to find new relevance and depth in the rituals of Passover: “The Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah Zine” by Micah Bazant and Dara Silverman. The authors intentionally did not copyright the piece and have made it available for free on the web, encouraging people to print it out and use it as the basis for a “choose-your-own-adventure progressive seder.” Traci used the zine as the basis for a joyful and politicized seder that I had the pleasure of participating in earlier this week.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has accused Israel of increasing its arbitrary repression of Palestinian non-violent activism lately. Abdullah Abu Rahma’s arrest — which I reported on in the second segment of my interview with Starhawk — is part of this crack-down in Bil’in, Nil’in, and Ramallah, where grassroots demonstrations have begun to mobilize Palestinians, Israelis, and international solidarity against the wall being built between the occupied territories and Israel. According to HRW,

Israel is building most of the barrier inside the West Bank rather than along the Green Line, in violation of international humanitarian law. In recent months, Israeli military authorities have arbitrarily arrested and denied due process rights to several dozen Palestinian anti-wall protesters.

Starhawk believes that the Israeli government fears this non-violent resistance more than the violent action they’ve contended with for years. Why? Because the government knows the movement’s power to shift public opinion and mobilize people against Israeli injustice. These grassroots efforts undermine several pillars of Israeli control in the occupied territories, according to Starhawk, and start to shatter the story that Palestinians are all evil terrorists.

Is this a less racist, sexist, homophobic country than it used to be? Some activists I know seem reluctant to agree that it is, because there is so far still to go that they feel it will sap our determination to go there.

The problem I have with this is not just that it’s wrong to say nothing has really changed but that it is so disrespectful to the activists of yesterday who did, actually, make a difference. It is also, for me anyway, much more dispiriting and likely to sap my activist energy if I think past activists had no real effect than if I feel they are heroes whose shoulders we can stand on.

So when I see significant generational differences between my generation of baby boomers and people in their twenties and thirties, I stand up and cheer.

Like most Jewish kids in postwar America, Starhawk grew up believing that Israel was the salvation of the Jewish people. She collected pennnies to plant trees in the Holy Land, learned Israeli folk songs and Israeli dances, and dreamed of going to Israel. At 15 she finally attended a Zionist program in Israel.

Star believes that she was raised with a compelling story — that Jews were kicked around for 2,000 years, almost exterminated in the Holocaust, and out of those ashes, finally got their own land again. “And by God,” she adds, “nobody’s going to take an inch of it away from us.” This is a persuasive story for many people, according to Starhawk. But unfortunately, the Palestinians aren’t in it.

For Starhawk, as for many American Jews of her age, it was painful to face the injustice that Israel was carrying out against the Palestinian people. Star senses that much of this injustice stems on a deep psychological level from an inability to see the Palestinian people as people — with their own humanity, their own rights, their own desires and flaws. Denying Palestinians that full range of humanity — and acknowledging that their ranks include the good, the bad, the vicious, the kind, the compassionate — is at the root of the unjust treatment they receive. Seeing every Palestinian as a suicide bomber who wants to kill an Israeli will not resolve this conflict. Nor will denying the existence of the Palestinians.

Starhawk hopes that another compelling narrative will begin to take the place of the one that she grew up with. This is a tale that’s very familiar to readers of Tikkun. It’s the story that Judaism stands for justice, for the regneration of the world, for tikkun olam. This, too, is a powerful story. And Star believes that if we can call people back to that story — as painful as it is to face the truth of what Israel has done to Palestine — then we can actually stop this injustice.

For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. And from the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, most recently supporting Palestinians in the occupied territories.

After spending last week with Starhawk, I realized that she’s a “meta-activist,” a node of many different types of activism, and a font of knowledge about how to act most effectively when demonstrating, educating, and building a new world. She’s been active in the women’s movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, in creating greater sustainability and a permaculture for the Earth, as well as in supporting Palestinian non-violence for the creation of a Palestinian state. Fortunately for all of us, as an active workshop presenter, Star has been passing along what she’s learned in all these areas. I interviewed her about two of those movements, the two p’s: Palestine and permaculture, and want to share those interviews over the next few days, beginning with her thoughts about Palestine.

This past December, Star planned to participate in the Gaza Freedom March, a demonstration of 1,400 people from 38 different countries that included a large contingent from France. The purpose of this gathering was to bring in much-needed humanitarian supplies as well as to call attention to the inhumane conditions in Gaza after the yearlong Israeli blockade that followed their bombing of Gaza.

As you may recall, Israel attacked about a year ago in response to rockets that Hamas shot into Israeli settlements. As Star reiterated in her comments, the international demonstrators came to support Palestinian non-violent resistance to Israel, and in no way condoned Hamas’ hostility. But Israeli aggression a year ago worsened an already difficult situation in Gaza, killing 1400 people, destroying 4,000 homes and 88 public buildings. Since then the Israeli blockade has kept needed supplies from reaching Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in abject poverty, malnutrition, and bad drinking water, as well as a lack of building materials and equipment to rebuild the devastated area. The state of affairs has deteriorated to the point where Gaza has become essentially an open-air prison with little to keep it going.

Dr. Benjamin Spock, the American pediatrician whose 1946 book "Baby and Child Care" is one of the biggest best sellers of all time, is arrested at a protest against the Vietnam War in Washington on May 16, 1972.

“Just don’t get arrested,” my mother repeatedly warned me. “You might hurt your career as a doctor.” She had lived through the McCarthy era and knew how easily careers ended. Heeding her words, I kept a low profile at anti-Vietnam war demonstrations.

In 1981 I finished medical school and began my training in Pediatrics. I found myself in what seemed like another war. I was a “private,” a subordinate to the hospital equivalents of lieutenants, colonels and generals. We fought childhood cancer and meningitis, premature birth and AIDS. I ascended the ranks, from the lowly intern to resident. At the time, all residents were subjected to repeated hits from “friendly fire”: enduring targeted questioning from superiors, designed to humiliate us by exposing our abysmal lack of medical knowledge before our colleagues. After three years of this teaching method, it took me awhile to recover from my own PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).

While living through this training, I’d come home exhausted to stare at the TV and take in the evening news. At the time, there was a lot of bad news coming from El Salvador. I once watched in horror as a student from the University of San Salvador was shot outside his classroom by military police. The young man moaned in anguish as his blood flooded onto the linoleum floor, and then he grew still.

I read about the four missing North American churchwomen, who had put themselves in harm’s way simply by helping others. Their bullet-ridden bodies had been discovered buried near the San Salvador airport. It seemed my mother was right about taking risks, and one could lose even more than a medical license.

Genesis

Twenty years ago (already!), I belonged to an activist church with a woman minister, gay leaders, and a social justice agenda. I chose it and similar organizations because my life of getting and spending, work and amusement, politics and personal life, felt empty and insufficient. So I took up a two-stranded way, spiritual and political, protests and potlucks, rallies and fund raisers, services and singing, meetings and celebrations. The church became an important community to me, but I needed further growth. Let me illustrate:

Our church owned and rented a tiny house to a woman and her teenaged son who were not parishioners. I lived close by, so they were my neighbors though I didn’t know their names and never introduced myself. At some point, I heard, the woman became ill with cancer, and then she died. Her son held a garage sale to raise funds; I browsed, but saw nothing I wanted and, with a vaguely uneasy feeling, walked away. Some weeks later, he came around selling Ginsu knives. I didn’t need knives, so I didn’t buy any. I don’t remember how many other attempts he made, but eventually he couldn’t make the rent and had to move out. That was the end.

At some point, I came to view this incident with horror, remembering my lack of response, the feeling I had that the situation was too bad but not my concern. I was focused on grand causes, so many ways to change the world that I could not help a neighbor even when he knocked at my door. Did it matter that I didn’t need an old kettle or Ginsu knives? Why couldn’t I have given money? Why couldn’t our whole church have put our heads and resources together to help? I’m sad and disappointed that our bottom line, the rent, prevailed over loving our neighbor and caring for the orphan, a literal neighbor, a literal orphan. It was almost a test case for living by principle, and I failed it. I remained passive (though sympathetic) in the face of need and pain; I often wonder if that struggling son thought, Churches and their ” love”: what a joke.

Big changes came about in both my personal and organizational life. I began to pay more attention. Those were the Reagan years when one effort after another came to heartbreaking failure. I began to ask the question: with all my hours of effort, all my meetings, whom exactly have I helped? Could I name one individual? I couldn’t – outside of family members. I became convinced that I needed to integrate long-term efforts with short-term acts and daily responses to unexpected opportunities, the kind that arise when heart and eyes are open. I wanted my destination and my journey to match. It’s a goal I still pursue.

This and my future posts on Tikkun Daily, then, represent an effort to remind myself and others of what small groups or individuals are doing right now and can do to heal and mend our local worlds, to celebrate the wonderful efforts we imperfect humans are capable of . May it strengthen us to– as the great French socialist, Jean Jaurès, put it –”live every day in a socialist state of grace,” to live now the battle that is “never won and never lost.”

Blessings on the journey!

Spotlight on Immigrant Service Day, August 29, 2009

We may look different, sound different, follow differing doctrines and dogmas, or none at all, but compassion is at the core of the major faiths and ethic systems of our world. The Golden Rule, or some form of it, is found in every major religion and in almost all if not every country on our planet. Karen Armstrong is counting on this unifying ideology to bring together individuals and communities this Friday for the launch of the Charter for Compassion. Here’s a short video about her campaign:

In one room, young Muslims, Jews, Christians, Hindus, secular humanists, and others cluster in a circle to learn strategies for facilitating constructive interfaith discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Down the hall, more young people — bareheaded or wearing headscarves or kippot — crowd together to discuss multifaith intentional living communities, learn about the Baha’i faith, create videos about youth-led interfaith activism, and train to volunteer as advocates for undocumented immigrants.

Talk about a rich space for conversation.

All this happened during one morning of the Interfaith Youth Core‘s 2009 conference, which took place October 25-27 at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago. The conference brought high school and college students engaged in interfaith work together with religious leaders, politicians, and authors interested in interreligious cooperation. Speakers included Greg Epstein, the Humanist Chaplain at Harvard; Tikkun Daily blogger Joshua Stanton, who founded the Journal of Inter-Religious Dialogue; Rami Nashashibi, the inspiring director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network; Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who has worked with Tikkun to garner support for a Global Marshall Plan; and others.