When I first began to awaken politically, I called a friend to ask what I would need to know to advocate for the causes I care about. My friend gave me a brief tour of the Texas Capital. Walking through the pictures of former legislators he said, “This is what you have to realize. Look into their faces. These are some of the dumbest people you will ever meet. Just don’t think you can reason them out of positions they did not reason themselves into.”
I don’t think the powerful are necessarily dumb at all, but they do benefit from a rejection of reason in favor of patriotic, capitalistic demogogery. Reason holds truth claims in the same scale no matter how much money is behind them. It is understandable then that many rich would want to destroy public education to keep a cheap workforce for their own progeny.
So we should have seen this coming. The Texas GOP has launched a war on reason. One battle in that war is a proposal to end the teaching of critical thinking skills. For a broader look at the GOP platform I have attached a recent Huffington Post article by Beth Broderick.
To read Truthout article on assault on critical thinking skills, click here.
To read Broderick article, click here.
Politics is how we share power. For people of privilege to say they aren’t political simply means they have no intention of sharing power. Certainly, religion should not be politically partisan and the separation of church and state should be inalienable. The gospel should never be reduced to politics, but neither should it be reduced to pious words without actual action either. As Dr. King said so many times, apolitical religion means to bandage those wounded and robbed on the Jericho road, but to do nothing to make their world safer. Holding such religion means to throw breadcrumbs to the hungry and mere scraps to the naked. The prophets have made it perfectly clear that God has no interest in worship done by nations whose hands are drenched with the blood of the poor.
I ran across an article written earlier in the year by Christian Piatt on Soujourner’s Magazine on cliches Christians might want to avoid. Obviously, this advice isn’t just for Christians. I personally have seen many bad situations made worse by well meaning people going into parrot mode. When there is really nothing to say silence is the best response. I thought the list might prompt a fruitful discussion.
To read article, click here.
Making that last post made me think of what might be some really bad book titles:
100 Clichés to Avoid Like the Plague
Inclusivity for all Mankind
How Civil Liberties Threaten Our Basic Freedoms
Learning How to Read in 10 Easy Lessons
Ventriloquism for Dummies
Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian Soul
As a minister, much of my life is spent waiting. Whether it is hospital waiting rooms, driving across town or waiting for someone who is running late. What we do in waiting rooms and stop lights is important because most of life consists in such interludes. One of the reasons we like movies and plays is because the plot line is so clear. In our own lives we’re born on stage in the middle of a script which we can never quite find. When they finally carry us off the stage we don’t know it, so for all intents and purposes our lives consist of transitions.
Cooks cannot prepare every ingredient at the same time, but must move one part of the meal to the backburner to give it more taste. Moments that do not seem useful in any other way are the foundries of the soul. In a sense, life is the chef and we ourselves are what is being cooked. The great virtues of courage and patience are not usually learned in comfortable settings. We learn courage at frightening times and patience at frustrating times. If instead of fretting at every stop light and flat tire, we learn the lesson of such moments we become better agents of change in the world. At such moments, we are not wasting our lives, we are spending time on the backburner from which all life’s taste comes.
If you want to see the true face of American foreign policy, look no further than Dick Cheney. Cheney is seen as a villain not because his views were exceptional but because he did not adequately disguise them for the American public. Michael Klare has written a long but helpful article that claims that the four keys to Cheney’s foreign policy were:
1. Promote domestic oil and gas production at any cost to reduce America’s dependence on unfriendly foreign suppliers, thereby increasing Washington’s freedom of action.
2. Keep control over the oil flow from the Persian Gulf (even if the U.S. gets an ever-diminishing share of its own oil supplies from the region) in order to retain an “economic stranglehold” over other major oil importers.
3. Dominate the sea lanes of Asia, so as to control the flow of oil and other raw materials to America’s potential economic rivals, China and Japan.
4. Promote energy “diversification” in Europe, especially through increased reliance on oil and natural gas supplies from the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea basin, in order to reduce Europe’s heavy dependence on Russian oil and gas, along with the political influence this brings Moscow.
It does not take a political scientist to recognize this is also the policy of Obama, and every other major player in both major political parties. Cheney’s “crime” was not that his policies were so different. His crime was in to refusing to wear the official mask. Robbery, lies and murder go hand in hand with any empire and our empire is no different. Cheney is hated not because his policies were so strong on the robbery and murder part, but because he was so weak on the lying part. He committed the unforgivable sin of showing the citizens of the American Empire our true face.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175560/tomgram%3A_michael_klare%2C_the_cheney_effect_%28in_the_obama_administration%29_
You might want to skip the first couple of discoveries that deal with drugs (it’s alternet after all), after that there is some interesting stuff here.
To read discoveries, please click here.
The effects of living in a dog eat dog economic system are impossible to measure. Who can guess what it does to the esteem of a school child to be graded like dogs in a show to prepare them for “success?” A Gallup poll taken in 143 nations in 2011 gives us a pretty good idea what it does mean to women.
“In many high-income countries — including New Zealand, Malta, Italy, France, Australia, and the U.S. — men are considerably more likely than women to say they feel safe walking alone at night in their communities.”
As I say, these subjects are impossible to measure, but why should these percentages fall so clearly along economic lines? Are we being injured in ways we don’t even imagine?
To read poll, click here.
The Declaration of Interdependence was written for the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro by the David Suzuki Foundation: http://www.davidsuzuki.org/.
“This declaration is a powerful and eloquent statement describing the interdependence and interconnectedness of all life on Earth. From 20 years ago, it speaks to us today, calling for a new evolution in the behavior of humankind.” -Martha Rogers
Thanks to Martha for sending.
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Declaration of Interdependence
This we know
We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us. We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins. We are the breath of the forests of the land and the plants of the sea. We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell. We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes. We share a common present, filled with uncertainty. And we share a common future, as yet untold. We humans are but one of thirty million species weaving the thin layer of life enveloping the world. The stability of communities of living things depends upon this diversity. Linked in that web, we are interconnected — using, cleansing, sharing, and replenishing the fundamental elements of life. Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its resources and the energy from the sun, and therefore has limits to growth. For the first time, we have touched those limits. When we compromise the air, the water, the soil, and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.
This we believe
Humans have become so numerous and our tools so powerful that we have driven fellow creatures to extinction, dammed the great rivers, torn down ancient forests, poisoned the earth, rain, and wind, and ripped holes in the sky. Our science has brought pain as well as joy; our comfort is paid for by the suffering of millions. We are learning from our mistakes, we are mourning our vanished kin, and we now build a new politics of hope. We respect and uphold the absolute need for clean air, water, and soil. We see that economic activities that benefit the few while shrinking the inheritance of many are wrong. And since environmental degradation erodes biological capital forever, full ecological and social cost must enter all equations of development. We are one brief generation in the long march of time; the future is not ours to erase. So where knowledge is limited, we will remember all those who will walk after us, and err on the side of caution.
This we resolve
All this that we know and believe must now become the foundation of the way we live. At this turning point in our relationship with Earth, we work for an evolution: from dominance to partnership; from fragmentation to connection; from insecurity to interdependence.
People have asked me to post news coming out of my denomination’s national meeting this week. Unfortunately, a denomination living in the past can’t produce news. Some are celebrating that our denomination almost did the right thing on gay marriage and celebrating how far we’ve come to lose by such a narrow margin, but I refuse to report on a dinosaur race. Instead, I am sharing a New York Times story that really is news. The head of Exodus International has renounced his group’s claim that sexual orientation can be changed.
“But the ex-gay movement has been convulsed as the leader of Exodus, in a series of public statements and a speech to the group’s annual meeting last week, renounced some of the movement’s core beliefs. Alan Chambers, 40, the president, declared that there was no cure for homosexuality and that “reparative therapy” offered false hopes to gays and could even be harmful. His statements have led to charges of heresy and a growing schism within the network.”
To read article, click here.