Jesus was a community organizer! on the front
Pontius Pilate was a governor! on the back
Recently in Current Affairs Category
Gbemisola Olujobi writing in truthdig points to racist stereotypes about Africans as oversexed and promiscuous are hampering the efforts of international health organizations to effectively battle the AIDS epidemic. So we get quotes like this from a participant in the 10th International AIDS Conference:
"AIDS would be brought under control only if Africans restrain their sexual cravings."--Dr. Yuichi Shiokawa;
or this, "Sex, love and disease do not mean the same thing to Africans as they do to West Europeans [because] the notion of guilt doesn't exist in the same way as it does in the Judeo-Christian culture of the West."--Professor Nathan Clumeck of the Universite Libre in Brussels, quoted in Le Monde section of The Manchester Guardian Weekly, Dec. 14, 1993.
Olujobi argues that this stereotype prevents the world community from focusing on the true cause of AIDS "such as poverty and the conditions that poverty creates--malnutrition, low immunity, stress, poor sanitation, overcrowding, poor access to health care, substandard health care, rural deprivation and urban squalor--all of which will facilitate the spread of AIDS or, indeed, any other disease."
I once witnessed a place where there were a bunch of people fishing. What was special about this pond was that the pond was full of fish, because fish were put in that pond, so that the fishers could fish them. The only rule was that the fishers had to throw the fish back after they caught them.
Isn't having impeachment hearings given the wealth of evidence that Bush administration has committed high crimes and misdemeanors and having instructions not to take a vote on impeachment sort of like fishing in a stocked pond, and then having to throw the fish back.
I recently committed People So Bold! to publicizing the work of a group of lawyers. Several years ago, the Unitarian Universalist Association had an Independent Affiliate called Unitarian Universalist Network for Indigenous Affairs, which helped educate Unitarian Universalists about the problems and promise of Native American Indians and let UUs know about specific things they could do help. In 2007 a new effort calling itself Unitarian Universalist Network for Indigenous Affairs has been established which presents educational website on world wide indigenous cultures. It does not appear to be an advocacy organization for Native American Indian rights. What should Unitarian Universalist who want to provide support for Native peoples do? There are several organizations which I believe that we can and should support and our support could make a real difference. First, let me introduce the lawyers.
The Native American Rights Fund (NARF) is an non profit law firm that is committed the rights of Native people, its team of attorneys take cases and engage in publicizing other ongoing legal cases that are defending Native American tribes and organizations with
Founded in 1970, the Native American Rights Fund is the oldest and largest nonprofit law firm dedicated to asserting and defending the rights of Indian tribes, organizations and individuals nationwide. The firm focuses its legal work on helping to realize these five mission areas.
Preservation of tribal existence
The future existence of the remaining Indian tribes in this country depends ultimately upon secure and permanent land bases, and the rights of self- determination necessary to preserve traditional customs and ways of life. Learn more.
Protection of tribal natural resources
The natural resources found on Indian lands vary greatly. NARF concentrates its efforts in asserting tribal resource rights and protecting them from loss and exploitation by non-Indians. Major resource protection includes land rights; water rights; hunting, fishing and gathering rights; environmental protection; timber rights; and prudent development of mineral resources.
Promotion of Native American human rights
The Native American Rights Fund is concerned with securing basic human rights for Native Americans in such areas as education, health, housing and religious freedom rights.
Accountability of governments to Native Americans
NARF focuses much of its efforts on guaranteeing that the federal and state governments are accountable for the proper recognition and enforcement of the many laws and regulations which govern the lives of Indian people.
Development of Indian law and educating the public about Indian rights, laws, and issues
This involves not only the establishment of favorable court precedents in major areas of Indian law, but also the compilation and distribution of Indian law resources to everyone working on behalf of Indian rights.
In the future I will be talking about the activities of Native American Rights Fund.
A 5-year-old Apache, Adriel Arocha, wears his hair long because of religious beliefs tied to his American Indian heritage. According his people's traditions a male can only cut his hair when he makes a major life transition. But the school District says that boys can't wear their hair long, and Adriel will need to cut his hair before he comes to school.
His mother said she is ready to fight and will not move to another school district that will let her son's hair alone: "It would just teach our son that it is easier to roll over and do what you're told and not stand up for your rights," she said.
Native American Indians have a lot of experience with American Presidents. After all, it has been and continues to be a matter of life and death to keep an eye on those who have invaded this land and run it without regard to the people whose were here, who know the land and love it as a sacred gift.
Therefore it is significant that Indian Country has for the first time become excited about a candidate.
Read Wind Dancer (Charo)
My friends,
Many Indian tribes are throwing their support behind Obama for president.
He has a great website, "The First Americans".
I think he will actually stand up and help the Indians on the reservations. He has voiced concerns with the Indian Health care problems, unemployment problems, and the housing problems on the rez. The toxic trailers are now being occupied on several reservations and people are becoming ill. They have no choice, but to live in those trailers.
I usually try to stay neutral, but, I feel we need a honest person who will honor existing treaties with the tribes, and bring humanity back.
What ever is your political choice, please check out Obama's, "First Americans" web site. We see hope in him as a way of bringing humanity back to the First Americans ( Indians).
Walk In Peace and Protect Mother Earth.
Wind Dancer
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| Surviving Hard Times: It's not for sissies by John Mohawk
Some cultures experience prophecies as some thing that happens to an individual. God, or some other supernatural force, designates someone, usually a male, to receive information about what is about to happen. That person becomes a prophet. In American Indian cultures, it is usually the collective, the people, who are given the information, although sometimes a teacher or individual arises among them to become a prophet. Certainly in historic times American Indian cultures produced charismatic prophets. Of special interest, however, is an earlier kind of prophecy akin to the Hopi prophecy, which does not designate a prophet but becomes the teachings of a people. In the ancient Hopi prophecies, we hear of worlds that once existed, of how people became corrupted and debauched, and how the powers of nature abandoned them. The people were forced to flee underground, only to emerge later to rebuild their world. The same thing happened three times, until emergence into this, the fourth world. But the fourth world, we are led to understand, is not permanent. This kind of prophecy is about how things were in the past and how they will come to be again. The Hopi story is that things were just wonderful until people forgot their obligations to the forces of nature; then nature abandoned them to natural catastrophes, destroying their civilization. But the people survived and emerged to rebuild. This story should be thought of not as a fantasy but as a collective memory. The archaeological and geological records show that past civilizations did exist in the desert Southwest, they did decline and disappear, and the people did re-emerge. The story is true. Europe in the "new" world When Europeans first began streaming into North America four centuries ago, they came from a continent that experienced persistent food shortages. A prevailing symbol of pre-modern Europe is the vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Disease, and Death. These images are not simply bogeymen. War was fairly common and often led to famine, which weakened the populations, leading to diseases and, of course, death. Waves of epidemic disease swept through Europe and the "known world," Asia, Asia Minor, and Africa, for centuries. The climate of Western Europe was often unpredictable, too cold for crops some years, warm enough other years. Often there wasn't enough food to eat, and it was not unusual that people in one place, say Bavaria, might be starving while people in another, say Tuscany, had a surplus. Not everyone was starving all the time, but almost every area experienced hunger some of the time. But when they arrived in the Americas, Europeans found plenty to eat. We know now that the Indians were responsible for this, although they gained scant praise or acknowledgment at the time. The English arrived in New England at a time when the region had been experiencing epidemic diseases and population declines, which may have been ongoing for generations due to infections brought by the Spanish far to the south. But the Indian legacy to New England was a bounty to the English. The Indians had managed their world to take advantage of nature's capacity for food production. Where berries would grow, the Indians encouraged them. Wherever Indians went, they planted food crops, especially nut trees. There is evidence that the walnut groves that the English immigrants encountered were planted by Indians as a food source. And nature helped. Food sources existed in North America in some abundance, especially the chestnut tree, which once comprised one-sixth of the North American forest. In addition, the Indians knew which wild plants to use as food. For famine to arrive in the North American forest, you would need one of the four horsemen: war. Disease and death, as I have said, preceded the arrival of the English. Some argue that the depopulation of the Indians accounted for some of the abundance of game, including the pigeons. But the forests had been managed in a way that encouraged, indeed helped feed, game populations. Indian land management, both at the village level and in the forest lands, encouraged food production. For the most part, the Indians didn't plant foods that were already available in abundance. Instead of creating a garden of blueberries, they encouraged the productivity of blueberry plantations established by nature. They didn't bring the blueberries to the village, the village went to the blueberries. During the nut and berry seasons, Indians were forever off somewhere gathering, drying, and preparing for storage foods that were provided by nature under the encouragement of humans. It was edible landscaping on a grand scale. The English, upon arrival, turned their livestock loose on the forest, and the blueberry and other wild food plants were destroyed. The English thought they were making "improvements" to the land. In addition, Indians had pushed agriculture as far north as possible in the millennium prior to English arrival, and the English benefited from the existence of beans, squashes, and, of course, corn. While the English concentrated their agriculture on small plots and pastures, the Indians managed huge areas of forest, burning off the underbrush periodically to make way for grasses to feed the deer and elk and other animals. It was mega-farm development with nature as the guiding hand. The English thought the Indians were nomads, but the English never had a clue what the Indians were doing. Indians of the woodlands had learned to cooperate with nature, which is an admonition of the Hopi story. And, like the Hopi, they had learned that sometimes even cooperation with nature was not enough to avoid catastrophe. The English arrived at an opportune time. The past 400 years had seen the nicest weather imaginable. It was certainly nicer weather than the ancient Indians knew. The English were at first a bit astonished at how violent storms could get even in this period of nice weather, and they would eventually encounter the tornadoes, blizzards, and hurricanes to which North America is prone. But the English have never seen North America at its worst, or even at its average. The Iroquois have a story about how the world was transformed. In this transformation the spirit of cold or ice is restrained, and the creator of good things--many of which are good things to eat--creates a world of plenty. The people are encouraged to be happy and grateful for this bounty, but they are forewarned that although things are productive and plentiful, they may not remain this way. Indeed, they will not. The Hopi and the Iroquois are consistent on this point: change will come. You probably think this planet's about you ... Human beings are hopelessly anthropocentric. To paraphrase the song: "You're so vain, you probably think this planet's about you, don't you?" So when something happens, like a giant volcano or a tsunami, an event in the Earth's history that has nothing to do with human beings, people rush forward looking for someone to blame. "God (or whatever) is punishing you because you didn't do whatever it was I wanted you to do." That kind of admonition is almost always followed with a prescription that has little to do with the problem at hand. Either you are to throw virgins into the volcano, murder persons of some religious or sexual orientation, or turn over all your worldly goods to the person who's exhorting you in the first place. The real problem is that people have experienced a real climatic change over the past 12,000 years that enabled the invention of agriculture. Agriculture provided a much more stable food supply, but it is also very vulnerable to climate changes. Even when a relatively small change occurs, such as happened in 1815 when a giant volcano erupted in Indonesia, sending dust into the air and causing a "year without a summer," great suffering ensues. Whether climate change is sudden or gradual, whether it gets warmer or colder, change is bad for people who are dependent on agriculture. The food systems of the North American Indians were more resistant to climate changes because, outside of the gardens, they promoted nature as the engine of food production. But those systems were destroyed by people who never saw them for what they were. And even very careful Indians, cooperating as well as they could with nature, experienced societal collapse in the desert Southwest and in desert cultures in Central and South America because conditions arose with which they could not cope. Given the information that climate change is inevitable and that its arrival will be a tremendous challenge to our food production capacities, a rational society would at least try to take measures to prepare for the future. It may be true, as stated in the Hopi prophecy, that human greed and foolishness will trigger the changes (actually I'm inclined to think that is true), but whatever the causes, the inevitability of change is clear enough. Our species was given 12,000 years of warm weather to prepare for the day when things would change again. Perhaps it will become colder or perhaps warmer, or worst of all, perhaps it will first become much warmer, then get cold. The latter would be the worst because the impact on the biology of the world would be equivalent to a catastrophic cleansing. Plant and animal systems in the north would be invaded by species and diseases from the south in a giant wave of extinctions. There would be no cold-weather species left. Then it would get cold again. Not a good outcome. Human beings are very adaptable, but they might not be that adaptable. The 12,000-year summer is probably coming to a close with either a super summer or a new winter. No one knows how much time is left. It would make sense to prepare for the future, but our systems of economics and politics are unlikely to move in that direction. The good news is, they could. It would be a daunting task. Food production and energy production systems would need to be devised that assumed there would be no replacement parts. Food plants would be selected based on their capacity to grow using less water and shorter growing seasons. Survivability and profit may not always coincide. Ways of taking advantage of what nature has to offer--instead of finding ways to overpower nature--would drive priorities. This kind of thing happened in the past. People made choices based not on what they wanted to do, but on what was possible to do. The earliest agri cultural societies arose because when food became scarce, the group so affected could not migrate to the next valley because that valley was occupied by other people. So they were forced to plant crops. And the crops they planted were the ones that could be domesticated, which were probably not their favorites. So they planted grain crops, and in the early years they suffered. The first agriculturalists almost always shrank in size relative to their ancestors and the peoples around them. But over time they recovered, somewhat. Eventually they thrived, but now they were vulnerable to drought and sand storms and early frosts. And now, when they were hungry, they could not move to the next valley. Now, when hungry, they must live on stored surpluses or starve. It was a problem for a long time, and is still a problem in a lot of places. Some of the very earliest human migrations took people out of Africa, through Asia Minor, and into Central Asia. There they established cultures that have survived tens of thousands of years in intensely hostile environments. Later, humans learned to survive in the arctic. And in rain forests. Humans can survive almost anything. But those were hunter-gatherers who evolved into herdsmen or moved on when things got difficult, not post-industrialists and refugees from a false utopian global economy. The coming millennium is not for sissies, but our generation should do what it can to provide options for whatever conditions arise. We have the capacity to provide those options if we can be realistic and if we have the will. The problem is, we who undertake this task won't make much money doing this, and until the fat lady sings, most of the people in the culture(s) around us are unlikely to be supportive. Human beings have a tremendous capacity to recover from disaster through collective amnesia. Mount Vesuvius has a thriving population at its base, the beaches where the tsunami of 2005 wreaked havoc are being rebuilt, areas of South Florida that were destroyed by hurricanes are being repopulated. The Hopi warned that our capacity to forget the past should not overwhelm our obligation to learn from it. We should listen to their message. John C. Mohawk, is a columnist for Indian Country Today, an author, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a YES! contributing editor. | ||||||||
Off to Burbank.
I got to the airport early because that is what the airport advisories said that is what we should do. Being here during code orange was pretty much the same as the last time I flew out of here in June (for St. Louis to go to GA.) The early morning crowds for the first flights of the morning were orderly, security was routine. I don't usually carry any liquids in my check in, so that was no problem. The laptop went through without having to be turned on. I have a camera and a radio in the checked baggage. I hear that it was okay last week as well.
Marjorie's friend in came down from Philadelphia on Saturday, she will be with Marjorie until I get back. She did experience more than usual hassle at security. I think a lot of it has to do with the airport, and what we expect. If I was coming back by way of LAX (Los Angeles's big airport) I would look forward to a lot of stress, but I don't anticipate to much problems going through Burbank. Some of the big city airports are always on the verge of breaking down. Tampa serves a big metropolitan area (Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater and the Gulf Coast sprawl) but does it with some degree of efficiency. I am just barely a frequent traveller, about nine flights a year, but I do notice that some airports are bottlenecks and some handle traffic efficiently.
Is it all management? Or were some airports built to handle traffic and crowds better than others? It is something to think about, especially when we hear ambitious ministers who want to turn old First Unitarian with its fair to middling size parking lot and its modest social hall into a megachurch. There may be limits imposed on our organizations by the buildings we build, limits that we can not overcome without major revisioning of physical plant.
Check out Technocrati. The Blogs are beginning to notice. Check out the mass media, the pundits are beginning to say it out loud.
"The war isn't working." That is the U.S. and Israeli goals for this 20 day reign of insanity have failed. Hezbollah is not about to be eliminated from Southern Lebanon.
They can't be eliminated unless one eliminates the population of Southern Lebanon.
Oh you say, Israel did not mean eliminate Hezbollah, the largest political party in Lebanon. They were speaking of eliminating Hezbollah's military capacity. They used eliminate Hezbollah, but they meant Hezbollah's fighting capacity. But it should be clear by now that military capacity won't be eliminated by air strikes. When has that worked in the last five decades? Isn't insanity doing over and over and over what has failed in the past.
Paul Krugman observes in his column this morning:
For Americans who care deeply about Israel, one of the truly nightmarish things about the war in Lebanon has been watching Israel repeat the same mistakes the United States made in Iraq. It's as if Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been possessed by the deranged spirit of Donald Rumsfeld. [...] What Israel needs now is a way out of the quagmire. And since Israel doesn't appear ready to reoccupy southern Lebanon, that means doing what it should have done from the beginning: try restraint and diplomacy. And Israel will negotiate from a far weaker position than seemed possible just three weeks ago. [...] Again, Israel has the right to protect itself. If all-out war with Hezbollah becomes impossible to avoid, so be it. But bombing Lebanon isn't making Israel more secure. [...] The hard truth is that Israel needs, for its own sake, to stop a bombing campaign that is making its enemies stronger, not weaker.
Violence begets violence. Olympia Brown taught our spiritual ancestors this:
"We can never make the world safe by fighting. Every nation must learn that the people of all nations are children of God, and must share in the wealth of the world. You may say that this is impracticable, far away, can never be accomplished, but it is the work we are appointed to do. Sometime, somehow, somewhere, we must learn this great lesson."
To which the faithful say, "Amen."
And to which the infants say "but Johnny hit me first." Yes he did. So. Handle it like an adult.
A political movement requires the support of its people, if one wishes to undermine a political movement it might be argued that it is pragmatic to support a divisive extremist group to disrupt the political unity of that movement. But watch out, supporting extremists may be costly in the long run.
So Israeli 'intelligence" created a religious extremist party to oppose a secular coalition whose mass movement was forcing Israel to an international conference! There are other stories on this site, which takes a critical look at all forms of extremism and violence mongering and suggests how the policies of retaliatory response has feed the cycle of violence.
