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(Article 2. of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

The declaration gets a bit costly to live out here because most of us belong to groups that exclude someone else based on one of the categories listed above. To be a citizen of the world means to put the common good over the limited moral isms, economics or politics of any lesser group. Whatever we pledge allegiance to must be harmonious with the whole.

It is not easy to make our peers angry, but we are actually giving them a great gift. We do not love our group less for loving the whole more.

Zero Dark Thirty is a new adventure movie which re-frames the facts of the killing of bin Laden to imply that torture was an important source of information in locating him. The movie opens with the words “based on first-hand accounts” but by that it means the author allowed CIA propagandists to shape the script.

The movie begins, of course, with shots of 9-11 and moves to repeated scenes of torture as agents seek to get information that will make America safe. The fact that torture is immoral and illegal is missing from the narrative.

Bonnie Tamres-Moore was at the opening of the movie last night to protest. She has developed a national movement to end torture. At the event they passed out the following handout.

JUST THE FACTS

Zero Dark Thirty is a work of fiction that creates the false impression that torture produced critical intelligence.  In December 2012, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved with a bipartisan vote a 6,000-page report on the results of a three-year investigation into the CIA torture program.  This report contains the facts about torture.

Here is what senators who are privy to the report said:

“[The] CIA did not first learn about the existence of the [Osama bin Laden] courier from detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques. Nor did the agency discover the courier’s identity from detainees subjected to coercive techniques.”

– Joint statement from: Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Chairman, Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Carl Levin (D-MI) Chairman, Senate Armed Services Committee

“It was not torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees that got us the major leads that ultimately enabled our intelligence community to find Osama bin Laden.”

– Senator John McCain (R-AZ)

And Leon Panetta, Secretary of Defense and former CIA Director, had this to say:

“In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier’s full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means.”

For more information about U.S.-sponsored torture, check out www.nrcat.org/fact-not-fiction

or contact Bonnie Tamres-Moore 907 S Center St. Austin, TX 78704 512-436-9307

The local newspaper took a shot at our church on page one of the metro section today. We had a car abandoned in our parking lot with a child on board the other night. It was a truly horrifying story, but as if that weren’t bad enough the reporter decided to make the story sound even worse:

The vehicle — with the 22-month-old child inside unharmed — was found at 9:51 p.m., about 35 minutes after deputies were called. It was less than a block away at Saint Andrews Presbyterian Church, in the 14000 block of Wells Port Drive in North Austin, officers said.

The property has a transient encampment that has had many reports of assaults, disturbances and illicit drug use, the affidavit said.

The reporter is referring to complaints we have received over the years as a result of trying to work with the homeless. If they had bothered to talk to us we could have told them we have rules against all those things, that we ask violators to leave, and are shutting down the ministry because we were not able to get a handle on all of the problems. Instead, Austin will read a front page story that makes our church look like the fight club with a drug component.

Several people came by the church worried that the article would hurt our reputation, but I realized we are in the enviable position of not having to lose sleep over what people call us. Our advocacy of issues like GLBT rights, reproductive rights for women, universal health care, letting atheists join the church and now working on the needs of homeless people has meant we’ve been called every name in the book. We are in that peaceful position of having no more reputation to lose.

James Douglas Ulrich had a great question about my post “Either/Or.” I’ll put the post, and then his response:

Either/or

Are you liberal or conservative? Do you believe in God or not? Whenever we reduce reality to such either/or categories we are in trouble regardless of which half we choose. The atheist Ingersoll and the believer Gandhi would have more in common with one another than either would have with the majority of their own group. Great souls stand like Colossus spanning the polarities of ordinary thought.

James Douglas Ulrich responds:

If you choose non-dualistic thinking as opposed to dualistic thinking, haven’t you made a dualistic judgement? dualistic or non dualistic, let’ s see. alright, all you non-dualists, you’re the good guys.

Great question. And from a dualistic perspective it would be a logical “check mate.” But to transcend that dilemma, let me compare polarized thinking as seeing in black and white and non-dualist thinking as seeing in color. There is another monist option popular among mystics to say the world is really white and black is an illusion or vice versa, but for today’s conversation let me compare seeing in black and white and seeing in color.

Someone who sees in color isn’t saying blank and white are wrong. She or he isn’t refuting dualism in a dualistic fashion, but contextualizing those shades within a spectrum of color invisible to those who only see in black and white. Or so it seems to me. What do you think?

How to be a citizen of the world.

(Learning the Universal Declaration of Human Rights one article at a time.)

(Article 1.)

• All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Obviously we must begin by amending the article to include women, so I will translate “brotherhood” as “solidarity.” Feel free to interject your own term.

The first lesson of universal human rights is that all people deserve freedom and equality. In other words, just because someone happened to be born to poor parents or on the other side of a boundary does not make them fair game for the rest of us.

Thomas Jefferson translated the principle thusly:

“All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man (translate“ universal human rights”). The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind (humankind) has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

“Freedom” and “equality” are the poles of justice. Just as some forms of socialism made the mistake of seeking equality without freedom, so some forms of capitalism make the mistake of seeking freedom without equality. Our first principle is that all people are born deserving both.

The first article also expresses a respect for reason. So long as cultures try to unify the world based on some religious or political revelation they will fail because reason and common humanity are the only foundations for solidarity. This first principle means that all of us must place our special claims to knowledge, privilege or power aside for the sake of this conversation.

The American prospect is greatly diminished by the fact that both major parties are willing to rationalize their own questionable deeds under the premise that the other party would do worse. They call it “pragmatisim,” but how can it be practical to sacrifice the best parts of ourselves because we will not risk defeat in pursuit of a noble cause? That is the practicality of owls and jackels, not human beings.

Our nation is in a downward spiral. Unless America wishes to die of this shortsighted pragmatism, it must produce a new kind of politician who would rather lose an election than his or her own principles.

Here’s the problem with capitalism in a nutshell. There is always more money to be made in denying health care than providing it. There is always more money to be made in private schools for the rich than public schools for the poor. There is always more money to be made in making pollution than cleaning it up. There will always be more money to be made through war than through peace.

It was the belief that free markets could guide us into a better future, that set us on the road to what are now our most unsolvable problems. And since anyone who confronts capitalism instantly loses credibility, the answers to climate change, war, political corruption, and health care are all hiding in the one place no credible person will look.

If humankind never sees the golden dawn of world peace it will not be because the quest was too whimsical or idealistic, but because each of us pursued universal principles in our own way, and only when it was to our own advantage.

We now consider due process for prisoners of war to be an unaffordable luxury. Even the most progressive of souls seems to feel that world peace under the rule of international law was a childish whim from some fantasy planet, and that violence is the only sane tool for organizing this one.

When we punished the war criminals of WW2 for doing some of the same things we now defend, we did not deem those standards to be unrealistic ideals, but the very underpinnings of civilization itself. If the world never sees a day of peace it will not be the principles that failed, but we.

“In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth, and more inequality than at any time period since 1928. The top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the financial wealth of the nation, while, incredibly, the bottom 60 percent own only 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In terms of income distribution in 2010, the last study done on this issue, the top 1 percent earned 93 percent of all new income while the bottom 99 percent shared the remaining 7 percent.”-Bernie Sanders

A New York Times article yesterday described in detail the sorry state of health in these United States. In a study of 17 other affluent nations the US often scored dead last.

 “Something fundamental is going wrong,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, chairman of the Department of Family Medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who led the panel. “This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”

The study linked a greater number of drug overdoses, car accidents and gun violence in the US as reasons why we did so poorly.

The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher.

Sixty-nine percent of all American homicide deaths in 2007 involved firearms, compared with an average of 26 percent in other countries, the study said. The US also had the highest infant mortality rate, the highest rates of STD’s among young people and the highest rates of diabetes among adults.

 “We expected to see some bad news and some good news,” Dr. Woolf said. “But the U.S. ranked near and at the bottom in almost every heath indicator. That stunned us.”

The researchers were at a loss to explain why the US is doing so poorly, but it really isn’t a mystery. It’s like the biblical prophets warned: a culture that values property over people and empire over human solidarity, will bleed to death from within even if it is the most powerful empire the world is ever known.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/health/americans-under-50-fare-poorly-on-health-measures-new-report-says.html?_r=0