Dennis Kucinich is calling for a period of “Truth and Reconciliation” for the United States. “Truth and Reconciliation” was the phrased used in attempts to deconstruct apartheid. Basically the idea is that before a wound can be healed, we must understand and remove whatever caused the wound in the first place.
Dennis Kucinich, is one of the few honest voices in Washington on the subject of the American Empire. In his words:
“Iraq did not pose a threat to the United States. Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction. Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. We were not duped. We were not fooled. It was obvious at the time. The evidence was in publicly available reports for anyone who cared to look. I personally distributed this memo to Members of Congress. In it I address the false justifications for war, point-by-point and establish the truth. I made the case in an hour-long presentation on the House floor. 133 Members of Congress were not duped; they voted against going to war with Iraq. The Bush Administration lied to the Congress and the American people to sell its war. The intelligence community wasn’t duped, The American people were duped we are still paying the price.”
The Iraq War has now cost us more lives than 9-11 for which it was supposed to be the revenge. Our resulting wars have wasted an amount that would easily pay off our national deficit. The Middle East is more dangerous now than before we began our efforts to make it safer.
Dennis Kucinich is right:
“America needs a period of truth and reconciliation. How can we avoid future wars if we don’t understand how consent was manufactured for a war against Iraq?”
To read more, click here: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/10-4
Following in the wake of other stunning revelations about the President’s troubling past, the Obama camp reeled today as a new video surfaced with more disturbing information.
For four years the Obama Whitehouse has been unable, or unwilling, to produce the umbilical cord that would prove he was born of natural human intercourse. Then, last month, a bombshell video surfaced showing that, as a college student, Obama explored nontraditional ways of looking at the economy. Now another video has surfaced that could very well prove that the infant Obama was a bed wetter.
The grainy home movies are hard to make out, but the bed clearly shows a stain of some sort, and the child in the movie seems to be black. Dr. Jake Sloan, who catalogues Obama conspiracy theories for a Washington think tank, was able to connect those dots and propose a new conspiracy theory that could very well bring the Obama Presidency to its knees.
Liberals will object that most children wet the bed, but most children do not grow up to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom. Nor do they grow up to shake the hands of world leaders with what were once urine soaked fingers.
Even if this President has broken his disgusting habit, is this the kind of example we want to set for our youth? And what would keep a President from wetting your bed or mine, if he once arrogantly wet his own?
I am getting ready to teach a class on Job. We are at that place in the first chapter when Job begins to lose everything dear to him. At one point he say the famous line, “Naked, I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return.”
It is sometimes thought that the “mother” Job refers to here is the earth since he speaks of returning to her, but then, I never take scripture at face value. I believe scripture is always intended to awaken us to life, not to besot us with beliefs and rules. Our verse today is a kind of initiation. Instead of adding beliefs to our already confused minds, the author instead strips our away our assumptions, leaving us in naked shivering awareness.
The process of shutting down the mind’s banter is sometimes called “negative theology.” Negative theology has a rich history in the East, but is largely ignored in the West. When Buddha spoke of “emptiness” it was a negative description of a very wonderful sense of dissolving into everything. The “nothingness” here is “no-thingness,” not vacuum.
In the East, the experience is suggested by riddles of broken mirrors, severed fingers, or asking what your face looked like before you were born. In the West, the same wonderful sense of terrifying unity can be found in works like “Cloud of Unknowing” or “Dark Night of the Soul” or the works of Meister Eckhart.
Today we find that negative theology in Job’s little song. Our human condition is that we are born naked from the earth, and we return to it naked. Negative theology is a reminder that our life does not consist in our possessions, our achievements, or even our beliefs. Negative theology strips away everything and leaves us only with a question. But that one question is a homing beacon to our source. “If my life does not consist of what I can have and hold, of what then does it consist?”
Just Northeast of Austin is a little community called “Pflugerville.” Actually, Plugerville isn’t so little anymore, and it definitely isn’t a backwards Texas town if it ever was one. The German tradition here in central Texas is very strong with beer festivals, celebration of music and a general live and let live attitude to politics. So, while I was delighted to hear that Pflugerville was the first school district in Texas to end discrimination against nontraditional families, I certainly wasn’t surprised .
Because our church gets so many of its members from Plugerville, I have often been asked to speak on panels or events for various schools in the Pflugerville ISD. I have been amazed at the courage of the teachers in challenging the dominant worldview in Texas, which is the willed ignorance of fundamentalism. The district has tried to avoid presenting liberal propaganda, while helping young minds question the limits of conservative propaganda. In other words, as a whole they have taught children not what to think, but how to think.
One cannot be a truly educated person within the confines of one’s own habits and culture. The purpose of education is to open us to a wider world where we can see all of nature as our home and all of humankind as one family. The similarity of the words “universal” and “university” is not a coincidence. A universal view recognizing the validity of beliefs and traditions other than our own is the goal of every educated person.
So Pflugerville ISD becomes the first school district in Texas to end its discrimination against nontraditional families. Here is hoping they will be the first pebble in a landslide of change.
http://www.google.com/#q=pflugerville&hl=en&safe=off&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=nws&sa=X&ei=0AV0UPSfLaWg2AWixIHoCQ&ved=0CAoQ_AUoBA&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=596e6edcd00f6a35&biw=1366&bih=673
Today is the day we pause to celebrate the man who discovered America, and who also raped and murdered many from the native population. When our nation celebrates brave Columbus, we won’t bring up the fact that he used native women as sexual prizes to his men, or that that the trail of dead was sometimes so long that people could navigate by them. We will celebrate his courage, but we will not speak of his greed, or mention the fact that he cut off the hands of native people’s who did not bring him enough gold.
The reason ending Columbus Day matters is because it reinforces the lie that white people discovered America. Every time we tell that lie we numb ourselves to the holocaust commited to the people who were already here. Everytime we tell that lie, we reinforce the idea that history as told by Europeans is the one narrative that matters, and that the voices of the colonized people are a mere footnote. Every time we repeat the lie that Columbus discovered America, we delay the day of recognition that we are standing on the rightful lands of the people we are calling immigrants or “illegal aliens,”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/06
You are going to your local convenience store to get groceries and they ask you if you want to contribute to a good cause. You give them a dollar and then later see them taking credit at some telethon. You stop for gas and see posters boasting that your oil company has planted a 4×4 garden in a slum somewhere. Do such charitable actions by corporations prove they care, or are they premeditate attempts to keep the public from calling corporations to account?
The following article may be helpful in beginning such a conversation. The author takes 4 such ad campaigns and attempts to put them in a larger context. To illustrate the question I have in mind about corporate charities, let me pose a illustrative question. If Al Capone steals a billion dollars, but then gives a million dollars back to an orphanage, is he really such a bad guy after all?
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/4-cynical-ad-campaigns-corporations-desperate-persuade-us
When Christians talk about Muslim extremism and mistreatment of women, they forget that the primary reason the persecution of women was tempered in Christianity was because Christian clerics found their own patriarchal claims mitigated by secular governments. As long as church and state were one, witches were burned, Jews were persecuted, and woman were treated like property.
I present to you exhibit A- Pat Robertson. In the following clip, a husband writes in to Pat about a disobedient wife. The good reverend, who believes in a divine pecking order of husbands over wives, laments that the man cannot move to Saudi Arabia where he could beat her back into proper piety. Whether Robertson is speaking a bit sarcastically or not, isn’t the point. The point, in my opinion, is that his Christian fundamentalist principles, if not prevented by the state, would very possibly lead to the same nightmare for women as Islamic fundamentalism.
The fundamental dividing line in religion is not between Christian and non-Christian, or even between believer and nonbeliever. The fundamental divinding line in religion is between those who worship love and those who worship power.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/pat-robertson-condone-wife-beating-saudi-arabia
As a minister I am often asked to do the kind of vacuous prayers that serve as numbing agent for public gatherings. For example, I am often asked to pray for world peace. Here is why I refuse to do so:
I do not think of God as an absent minded ruler who has dozed off and must be awoken with prayers and sacrifices. Instead, I agree with Marx that a religion that does not liberate the masses is merely decorating their chains with flowers.
Any prayer asking God to change our conditions pretends we are not creating them in the first place.
So when I am asked to pray or meditate for peace I must refuse for two reasons. First, I must refuse because I do not believe God is the one who needs to change. Secondly, I must refuse because I do not believe most war springs from hatred. Most war is born out of an unconscious pride and greed. And so, when a self-indulgent nation comes together to pray or meditate for peace, it is a dangerous act of self-deception.
The Bible talks about the “Age of Jubilee” when the nations of the world will hammer their weapons into tools. The Bible speaks of a day when the mighty will be removed from their places of privilege, and the wretched of the earth will be lifted up to a place of equality. The Bible speaks of a time when the wealth that has been hoarded will be taken from the rich and redistributed fairly with all. The Bible speaks of a day of liberation for all those who live in economic slavery, which of course would put an end to the American Empire, and every other empire as well.
Peace will not come without justice. It will not come until enough people consecrate themselves to work for Jubilee. If anyone ever wants me to give that prayer, let me know.
The video below is a clip from a 4 minute video called ’40 Days of Prayer for our Nation’ made by Bishop Harry Jackson. In the video the Bishop tells Christians to pray that their local churches and national televangelists will tell them who to vote for.
“I want to encourage you to pray for the local church and for the radio and television ministries around our nation. We need to pray they become prophetic voices to our generation.”
“I believe, especially in this election season, they need to speak to us and give us direction. They need to tell us who to vote for. Who has the prophetic mantle of God on them. In other words, who is carrying out God’s will in our day?” -Bishop Jackson
Actual prophetic voices call us to our own wisdom and power. Any prophet who tells people to mindlessly obey is a shepherd with a taste for lamb chops.
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/religion/christianity/video-bishop-harry-jackson-says-churches-need-tell-us-who-vote
The company that calls itself “the most trusted name in news” was just caught in a misrepresentation. After the Presidential debate, CNN announced,
“Two-thirds of people who watched the first presidential debate think that Republican nominee Mitt Romney won the showdown, according to a nationwide poll conducted Wednesday night.”
But there was a problem. The only statistically significant numbers of people polled came from white Southerners over the age of 49.
“The survey (link to PDF of survey), conducted for CNN by ORC International , a polling company, solicited the opinions of 430 adult respondents, whose political party affiliations were roughly representative of the national average, with 33% of respondents identifying as Republicans, 37% as Democrats, and 29% as Independents.
But the regional and ethnic makeup of respondents was skewed almost to the point of statistical impossibility.
The ORC International study states that no statistically significant numbers of respondents were polled from the U.S. Northeast, Midwest, or West. The ORC survey polled only statistically significant numbers of respondents from the U.S. South.”
According to this article, the poll also was also missing the voice of non-white minorities. This incident serves as a reminder that mainstream media is brought to you by corporate sponsors. Major news organizations are owned by the richest of the rich. The myth that the media is liberal would be ridiculous to any who consider the nature of the beast.
http://www.alternet.org/speakeasy/brucewilson/cnns-national-debate-poll-surveys-over-49-white-southerners