Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/tikkun-admin/page/39/)
President Obama’s Insider Threat Program has turned millions of federal workers into mandated, behavioral profiling specialists, ordering them to report colleagues whose actions raise supposed red flags. Security can no longer be a justification for these programs. Not just because they violate our rights as Americans. But also because they will not work.
The stories you have heard this morning are master/disciple stories. They tell of the moment of decision to leave everything and go. These stories are about you and me. If they were merely about the old heroes, we’d find them only behind glass in libraries. But they are here because they are about that moment of decision for possibility in the crisis you are facing. The door of the eternal is here: the infinite in a moment. Or not.
Since April, a growing number of North Carolinians have gathered at North Carolina’s General Assembly to collectively petition an extreme legislature whose daily decisions are attacking the general welfare. We have called these gatherings “Moral Mondays,” and an awakening of hope led by people of faith has been at the heart of them. On this Monday, dozens of doctors, nurses, school teachers and environmental activists led the crowd of over 4,000 people. This is the statement made by a public school teacher before she was arrested.
Last week, the Supreme Court, by what seems like divine intervention, struck down much of DOMA and Proposition 8 in one fell swoop. This ruling has created a new pathway to citizenship for same-sex bi-national couples. This is a big step forward in the fight for just immigration reform but it’s just a step. A recent survey of the homeless community in San Francisco identified that over 25 percent of the population living on the streets is LGBT. And thousands of people of color and other minorities have just lost protections around their right to vote. We have come a long way, and we still have a very long way to go.
“The Attack” is a powerful, must-see film for those of us interested in Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians. This essay briefly analyzes the film with attention to its divergence from the book on which it is based and analysis of the politics surrounding these changes.
The freed slaves and all the generations since the first Juneteenth celebrate freedom. At the same time as we honor and celebrate the continuing struggle for the freedom of all humankind, we rededicate ourselves to a universal goal of justice and peace, both now and into the future. President Obama’s speech before the Brandenburg Gate on Juneteenth 2013 spoke this rededication.
Calderone’s move to ask McChrystal for comment so soon after Hastings’ death immediately struck me as mildly inappropriate, given the former general’s connection to Hastings. More than that, however, it struck me as something – a comment from McChrystal – that would have virtually no journalistic value or significance.
The role of the United States should be to support unconditional negotiations involving all sides with no stated goal other than to end the killing. (Expecting the Assad regime to negotiate when we say the goal of negotiations is its removal is absurd). Helping to end the slaughter of innocents (by both sides) through diplomacy is the only appropriate role for this country. It is also an essential role. Dictating solutions to any other country’s civil war is nothing but 19th century imperialism, no different than President McKinley’s war to “liberate Cuba.”
In the meantime, these searches and, sometimes, seizures performed routinely at airports across this country have done something more than potentially violate our Fourth Amendment rights: they have conditioned us to accept the invasion of our privacy and person for the sake of security. How far will we let this country go until we, as a public, say that this is enough? That we will no longer allow strange hands to grope our children for the sake of security? That we will no longer allow strange minds to illegally probe our phone records and emails for the sake of security?
Left-wing concerns that she has a quick-draw reflex toward military action are overdrawn and unfair. I remember her presentation at a New York University conference in 2006 … in which she spoke of her break with Michael Ignatieff … because of his pro-Iraq war stance.