Editorials & Actions

Another Anti-war Hero Passes: David McReynolds

By Rabbi Michael Lerner | August 23, 2018

A Death in the Family:

David McReynolds, Pacifist, Socialist, Ailurophile

by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

A great force for a peaceful world left the planet when David McReynolds, who for decades was the best-known voice of American radical pacifism, died August 17 of injuries from a fall in his East Village home. He was 88 and had spent almost 40 years on the staff of the War Resisters League as a self-described “movement bureaucrat.” He ran twice for the presidency and once for Congress, traveled the world promoting nonviolent resistance, wrote one book and innumerable articles and pamphlets, came out as gay long before most people in public life did, and documented the movements of his time in indelible photographs. He was one of the last (and youngest) of a heroic generation of pacifists who resisted war and militarism between World War II and the Vietnam War and went on to help forge a vibrant peace movement in the aftermath of the wars.  

Life Before WRL

Born in 1929 into a comfortable Baptist family in Los Angeles, McReynolds early on evinced his commitment to pacifism and Marxism, saying much later that he “didn’t see how one could be one without being the other.”  Equally apparent by his adolescence, if not before, were the outsize contradictions that would characterize his adult life. A tall, gangling teenager, aware of his homosexuality from the age of ten and, as he later wrote, “haunted” by it, in high school he joined the World Fellowship Club to oppose U.S. Cold War policies.

Other Voices

Can the World Unite Against Trumpism?

By Rabbi Michael Lerner | August 23, 2018

Editor’s Note: Thanks to our media ally TomDispatch.com for sharing this article with Tikkun. Can Donald Trump Unite the World (Against Himself)? The Rise of an Anti-Trump Movement Globally — and on His Home Turf
By Dilip Hiro

One thing already seems clear in the Trump era: the world will not turn out to be the American president’s playground.  His ultra-unilateralist, rejectionist policies on trade, the Iran denuclearization agreement, the costs of defense, and climate change are already creating an incipient anti-Trump movement globally (and in the United States as well). To a remarkable degree, the countries he has targeted are banding together to oppose him and his policies.  That still inchoate but gathering opposition assures that, whatever Donald Trump’s view of America may be, it is no longer — in the phrase coined 20 years ago by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — the “indispensable nation.” Abroad or even at home, with the president facing increasingly strong headwinds on climate change at the state and local level, we’re entering a new world order on the heels of the collapsed American domination of the past three-quarters of a century. Let’s consider the opposition Trump has generated on an issue-by-issue basis.

Other Voices

The Audacious and Inspirational Gift of Pride: How 50 Years of Hopeful Resistance Can Inspire Us Today

By Rabbi Michael Lerner | June 21, 2018

by . Rabbi Mike Moskowitz and Rev. Dr. Amy Butler 
A prominent progressive faith leader posted a question on Facebook this week asking other faith leaders and scholars “How are you doing with everything that is going on politically?”  This has been a week in which all of us are feeling the deep divisions in our country.  

Those of us to inhabit spaces of privilege may feel a growing hopelessness, like a chasm opening up in front of us these days; it’s like the advent of a deep nighttime that perhaps we have not seen in our lifetimes. We are waking up to the realities of injustice and oppression that have defined the daily living experience of too many of our neighbors. For those of us who tend faith communities and teach people of faith how to birth into the world more kindness, justice, and peace, well…times are hard.  

Folks answered the question with comments like:

“I’m angry, really angry, and when not angry, deeply depressed.”

“I kind of lost my shit in preaching class today.  I’m the professor.”

“I’m tired and worried.”

“Pretty scatterbrained and struggling to focus.  My sleeping is erratic.”

“Exhausted.”

“I felt physically ill driving to the office this morning, and realized it was a physical reaction to the news I was listening to.”

“Helpless to change the situation.”

 

Any one of us paying even the slightest attention to the atrocious policies being implemented by the American government, both within, along, and outside our borders, can’t be unfamiliar with feelings like these.  Sometimes the darkness of this world, the evil all around us, steals our joy and cripples our resolve.

US Politics

A Poor People’s Campaign Activist Reports on Its Reality in Greensboro North Carolina

By Rabbi Michael Lerner | June 11, 2018

A Greensboro Social Justice Activist on the Poor People’s Campaign

We are two weeks into a six-week season launch of moral resistance and revival when my friend and mentor of nearly fifty years, Reverend Nelson Johnson, brings those assembled up to date. His words thrill me when he says that the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival “has the greatest potential of any grassroots movement in the nation to shift the moral narrative and transform our country.”

Launched on May 14th, under the leadership of Co-Chairs Rev. Dr. William Barber and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharris, the first phase of the Poor People’s Campaign concludes on June 23, 2018, when a mass mobilization will bring thousands of people from states around the country to the US Capitol in Washington, DC. They will come as part of a movement that demands a moral awakening for our country. Many more, undoubtedly, will join the current foot soldiers of this righteous campaign. To those justice-loving folks assembled in Greensboro, NC, and already feeling the angst of our troubled times, an awareness of the dangerous and critical point we have reached was perhaps the reason they became affiliated with the two-year old  local organization, Democracy Greensboro, in the first place.