Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/tikkun-admin/page/37/)
There are many ways to embarrass the United States. For example, refusing extradition requests or illuminating its hypocrisies. And while such methods can work, they are one-hit wonders, unable to be sustained over the long haul.
However, one method for embarrassing the United States has been perfected so finely that it can be repeated, over and over, without fail, as Israel has done.
Last week, my phone vibrated loudly, dancing upon the dining room table and startling me while writing. On the line was a producer for CBS Sunday Morning, who had called upon learning about my forthcoming book, What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?
At a time when too many people are out of work and too many others are holding down two or three jobs just to survive, it might seem a bit frivolous to lament the lost art of leisure. But leisure – restorative time – is a basic human need. And fewer people are getting the benefit of it, apparently even when they’re on paid vacations. A new Harris survey finds that more than half of all U.S. employees planned to work during their summer vacations this year – up six percent from the previous year. (Email is a prime suspect in this crime against leisure.) Soon enough, all of us will be taking presidential-style vacations like the one starting tomorrow.
When Cornel West, a vocal advocate for the poor and a staunch critic of income inequality, compared Edward Snowden to John Brown, he knew the analogy would be seen by many as provocative or extreme. West’s intention was not to equate the liberation of slaves with the liberation of Americans from a growing security apparatus. Instead, it was to amplify the issue of NSA surveillance as one of critical importance.
In 2013, the Obama administration is doing exactly what Senator Obama feared in 2005: that the Patriot Act would allow the NSA to engage in bulk surveillance on millions of American citizens unconnected to individual investigations.
Human beings seem to come with certain built-in spiritual inclinations, and gratitude is chief among them. Parents and teachers think we have to be taught to say thank you, but maybe it just comes naturally. Still, like any spiritual inclination, gratitude can be cultivated into a more fulsome flowering.
The First Amendment and press freedoms are essential to a functioning democracy, and why it is considered in the United States, in its ideal form, as the ‘Fourth Estate.’ The right to report upon those things politicians wish to hide has always been a constitutionally-sanctioned check against government abuse.
Put another way: the press has always been a constitutionally-sanctioned whistle-blowing institution.
God’s future comes to the church, not from best-laid plans, but from dialogue with the help we need; not from anxious arrangements with our fears, or our budgets, but from conversations with soul friends. Healing, after all, is not getting what we thought we wanted. Healing is receiving our own experience of God. That is how it worked for Naaman.
OK, this last email pushed me to my limit. The subject line heading read: “Barack needs you, right now.” You’ve got to me kidding me. Barack needs ME? For what?
Since 2008, the Obama administration had made available the President’s original campaign promises at Change.gov. However, the Obama administration removed access to these promises on June 8, two days after Edward Snowden’s first revelation. The likely reason? One of those promises was to protect whistleblowers.