Visions and Ideals by James Allen

Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so shall you become. Your Vision is the promise of what you shall one day be; your Ideal is the prophecy of what you shall at last unveil.

The greatest achievement was at first and for a time a dream. THIS IS THE LINE I LOVE: The oak sleeps in the acorn; the bird waits in the egg; and in the highest vision of the soul a waking angel stirs. Dreams are the seedlings of realities.

Your circumstances may be unpleasant, but they shall not long remain so if you but perceive an Ideal and strive to reach it. You cannot travel within and stand still without.

You, too, will realize the Vision (not the idle wish) of your heart, be it base or beautiful, or a mixture of both, for you will always gravitate toward that which you, secretly, most love. Whatever your present environment may be, you will fall, remain, or rise with your thoughts, your Vision, your Ideal. You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.

The thoughtless, the ignorant, and the lazy, seeing only the apparent effects of things and not the things themselves, talk of luck, of fortune, and chance. See a man grow rich, they say, “How lucky he is!” Observing another become intellectual, they exclaim, “How highly favored he is!” And noting the saintly character and wide influence of another, the remark, “How chance aids him at every turn!”

They do not see the trials and failures and struggles which these men have voluntarily encountered in order to gain their experience; they have no knowledge of the sacrifices they have made, of the undaunted efforts they have put forth, of the faith they have exercised, that they might overcome the apparently insurmountable, and realize the Vision of their heart. They do not know the darkness and the heartaches; they only see the light and joy, and call it “luck”; do not see the long and arduous journey, but only behold the pleasant goal, and call it “good fortune”; do not understand the process, but only perceive the result, and call it “chance.”

In all human affairs there are efforts, and there are results, and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result. Chance is not. “Gifts,” material, intellectual, and spiritual possessions are the fruits of effort; they are thoughts completed, objects accomplished, visions realized.

The Vision that you glorify in your mind, the Ideal that you enthrone in your heart—this you will build your life by, this you will become.
____________
James Allen was born in Leicester, England on November 28, 1864. When he was fifteen, the family business failed and his father left for America to find work. His father was murdered before he could send for the family and subsequently, James left school and worked for several British manufacturers until 1902. His literary career lasted only nine years until his death in 1912. As A Man Thinketh was his second book.

complex love of country

Patriotism's Secret History
by PETER DREIER & DICK FLACKS

[from the June 3, 2002 issue]

Many Americans believe that the left is "antipatriotic" (and even anti-American), while the political right truly expresses the American spirit and reveres its symbols. Particularly since the late 1960s--when the movement against US intervention in Vietnam gained momentum--the terms "progressive" and "patriotism" have rarely been used in the same sentence, at least in the mainstream media. It has become conventional wisdom that conservatives wave the American flag while leftists burn it. Patriotic Americans display the flag on their homes; progressives turn it upside down to show contempt.

Recent months have seen a dramatic increase in the number of Americans proudly displaying the Stars and Stripes on their cars, homes, businesses, T-shirts, caps, lapel pins and even tattoos. This outpouring of flag-waving signifies a variety of sentiments--from identification with the victims of the September 11 attacks to support for the military's invasion of Afghanistan. But in our popular culture, displays of the American flag are--along with the very idea of "patriotism"--typically viewed as expressions of "conservative" politics. The patriotic fervor since September 11 has revitalized that belief and, as in other times, has given conservative politicos and pundits a handy means to undermine dissent and progressive initiatives.

A case in point: In Santa Barbara, California, progressive County Supervisor Gail Marshall is facing the possibility of a recall election fueled by right-wing forces opposed to her support for environmental regulation, affordable housing and labor unions. Because Marshall occupies the key swing seat on the five-member county board, Santa Barbara's conservative activists--funded by oil interests, agribusiness and land developers--have been trying to unseat her for years. They launched a recall campaign after Marshall refused to rubber-stamp a proposal to require the Pledge of Allegiance at meetings of one of her community advisory boards. Marshall said she wanted the board to discuss the idea, but her opponents--who made sure that TV camera crews were present at the meeting where the issue first surfaced--have turned her civil libertarian instincts into proof that she's hostile to public expressions of patriotism.

In TV ads and newsletters, Marshall's opponents--who are gathering signatures for a recall petition that, if successful, will go before the voters this fall--claim that her alleged reluctance to have the pledge recited was clear confirmation of their suspicion that she is a "socialist."

Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by a leading Christian socialist, Francis Bellamy, who was fired from his Boston ministry for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist. Bellamy penned the Pledge of Allegiance for Youth's Companion, a magazine for young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000.

A few years earlier, the magazine had sponsored a largely successful campaign to sell American flags to public schools. In 1891 the magazine hired Bellamy--whose first cousin Edward Bellamy was the famous socialist author of the utopian novel Looking Backward--to organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools. Bellamy gained the support of the National Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program's flag salute ceremony.

Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age, with its robber barons and exploitation of workers. Bellamy intended the line "One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all" to express a more collective and egalitarian vision of America.

Bellamy's view that unbridled capitalism, materialism and individualism betrayed America's promise was widely shared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many American radicals and progressive reformers proudly asserted their patriotism. To them, America stood for basic democratic values--economic and social equality, mass participation in politics, free speech and civil liberties, elimination of the second-class citizenship of women and racial minorities, a welcome mat for the world's oppressed people. The reality of corporate power, right-wing xenophobia and social injustice only fueled progressives' allegiance to these principles and the struggle to achieve them.

Most Americans are unaware that much of our patriotic culture--including many of the leading icons and symbols of American identity--was created by artists and writers of decidedly left-wing and even socialist sympathies. A look at the songs sung at post-9/11 patriotic tribute events and that appear on the various patriotic compilation albums, or the clips incorporated into film shorts celebrating the "American spirit," reveals that the preponderance of these originated in the forgotten tradition of left-wing patriotism.

Begin with the lines inscribed on the Statue of Liberty: "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." Emma Lazarus was a poet of considerable reputation in her day, a well-known figure in literary circles. She was a strong supporter of Henry George and his "socialistic" single-tax program, and a friend of William Morris, a leading British socialist. Her welcome to the "wretched refuse" of the earth, written in 1883, was an effort to project an inclusive and egalitarian definition of the American dream.

The words to "America the Beautiful" were written in 1893 by Katharine Lee Bates, a professor of English at Wellesley College. Bates was an accomplished and published poet, whose book America the Beautiful and Other Poems includes a sequence of poems expressing outrage at US imperialism in the Philippines. Indeed, Bates identified with the anti-imperialist movement of her day and was part of progressive reform circles in the Boston area concerned about labor rights, urban slums and women's suffrage. She was also an ardent feminist, and for decades lived with and loved her Wellesley colleague Katharine Coman, an economist and social activist. "America the Beautiful" not only speaks to the beauty of the American continent but also reflects her view that US imperialism undermines the nation's core values of freedom and liberty. The poem's final words--"and crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea"--are an appeal for social justice rather than the pursuit of wealth.

Many Americans consider Woody Guthrie's song "This Land Is Your Land," penned in 1940, to be our unofficial national anthem. Guthrie was a radical with strong ties to the Communist Party. He was inspired to write the song as an answer to Irving Berlin's popular "God Bless America," which he thought failed to recognize that it was the "people" to whom America belonged. The words to "This Land Is Your Land" reflect Guthrie's fusion of patriotism, support for the underdog and class struggle. In this song Guthrie celebrates America's natural beauty and bounty but criticizes the country for its failure to share its riches, reflected in the song's last and least-known verse:


One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the relief office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry I stood there wondering
If this land was made for you and me.

Guthrie was not alone in combining patriotism and radicalism during the Depression and World War II. In this period, many American composers, novelists, artists and playwrights engaged in similar projects. In the early 1930s, for example, a group of young composers and musicians--including Marc Blitzstein (author of the musical "The Cradle Will Rock"), Charles Seeger (a well-known composer and musicologist, and father of folk singer Pete Seeger) and Aaron Copland--formed the "composers' collective" to write music that would serve the cause of the working class. They turned to American roots and folk music for inspiration. Many of their compositions--including Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Lincoln Portrait"--are now patriotic musical standards, regularly performed at major civic events.

Earl Robinson was a member of the composers' collective who pioneered the effort to combine patriotism and progressivism. In 1939 he teamed with lyricist John La Touche to write "Ballad for Americans," which was performed on the CBS radio network by Paul Robeson, accompanied by chorus and orchestra. This eleven-minute cantata provided a musical review of American history, depicted as a struggle between the "nobodies who are everybody" and an elite that fails to understand the real, democratic essence of America.

Robeson, at the time one of the best-known performers on the world stage, became, through this work, a voice of America. Broadcasts and recordings of "Ballad for Americans" (by Bing Crosby as well as Robeson) were immensely popular. In the summer of 1940, it was performed at the national conventions of both the Republican and Communist parties. The work soon became a staple in school choral performances, but it was literally ripped out of many public school songbooks after Robinson and Robeson were identified with the radical left and blacklisted during the McCarthy period. Since then, however, "Ballad for Americans" has been periodically revived, notably during the bicentennial celebration in 1976, when a number of pop and country singers performed it in concerts and on TV.

During World War II, with lyricist Lewis Allen, Robinson co-wrote another patriotic hit, "The House I Live In." Its lyrics asked, and then answered, the question posed in the first line of the song, "What is America to me?" The song evokes America as a place where all races can live freely, where one can speak one's mind, where the cities as well as the natural landscapes are beautiful. The song was made a hit by Frank Sinatra in 1945. Sinatra also starred in an Oscar-winning movie short--written by Albert Maltz, later one of the Hollywood Ten--in which he sang "The House I Live In" to challenge bigotry, represented in the movie by a gang of kids who rough up a Jewish boy.

"The House I Live In," like "Ballad for Americans," was exceedingly popular for several years but became controversial during the McCarthy period and has largely disappeared from public consciousness. Its co-author, Lewis Allen, was actually Abel Meeropol, a high school teacher who also penned "Strange Fruit," the anti-lynching song made famous by Billie Holiday. In the 1950s Meeropol and his wife adopted the sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg after their parents were executed as atom spies. Despite this, Sinatra kept the song in his repertoire. Perhaps the most astonishing performance of "The House I Live In" was at the nationally televised commemoration of the centenary of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, when Sinatra sang it as the finale to the program, with President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy Reagan, sitting directly in front of him.

Only a handful of Americans could have grasped the political irony of that moment: Sinatra performing a patriotic anthem written by blacklisted writers to a President who, as head of the Screen Actors Guild in the 1950s, helped create Hollywood's purge of radicals. Sinatra's own left-wing (and nearly blacklisted) past, and the history of the song itself, have been obliterated from public memory.

Even during the 1960s, American progressives continued to seek ways to fuse their love of country with their opposition to the national government's policies. The March on Washington in 1963 gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. famously quoted the words to "My Country 'Tis of Thee." Phil Ochs, then part of a new generation of politically conscious singer-songwriters who emerged during the 1960s, wrote an anthem in the Guthrie vein, "Power and Glory," which coupled love of country with a strong plea for justice and equality. Interestingly, this song later became part of the repertoire of the US Army band. And in 1968, in a famous antiwar speech on the steps of the Capitol, Norman Thomas, the aging leader of the Socialist Party, proclaimed, "I come to cleanse the American flag, not burn it."

In recent decades, Bruce Springsteen has most closely followed in the Guthrie tradition. From "Born in the USA," to his songs about Tom Joad (the militant protagonist in John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath), to his recent anthem for the victims of the September 11 tragedy ("My City of Ruins"), whom he urges to "come on rise up!" Springsteen has championed the downtrodden while challenging America to live up to its ideals. Indeed, by performing both "Born in the USA" and "Land of Hope and Dreams" at benefits for the families of World Trade Center casualties, Springsteen has coupled his anger at injustice with his belief in the nation's promise.

In each major period of twentieth-century history--the Progressive era, the Depression, World War II and the postwar era--American radicals and progressives expressed a patriotism rooted in democratic values and consciously aimed at challenging jingoism and "my country, right or wrong" thinking. Every day, millions of Americans pledge allegiance to the flag, sing "America the Beautiful" and "This Land Is Your Land," and memorize the words on the Statue of Liberty without knowing the names of their authors, their political inspiration or the historical context in which they were written.

The progressive authors of much of America's patriotic iconography rejected blind nationalism, militaristic drumbeating and sheeplike conformism. So it would be a dire mistake to allow, by default, jingoism to become synonymous with patriotism and the American spirit. Throughout our nation's history, radicals and reformers have viewed their movements as profoundly patriotic. They have believed that America's core claims--fairness, equality, freedom, justice--were their own. In the midst of current patriotic exuberance both authentic and manipulated, then, it is useful to recall the forgotten cultural legacy of the left. We need to ask, once again, "What is America to us?"

Rabbi Lerner responding to Cindy Sheehan's Resignation from a Leadership Role in Anti-War Work

A note from Rabbi Michael Lerner:

I've contacted Cindy Sheehan to ask her to reconsider her decision, but I certainly understand much of what she is talking about in the note below describing her decision to leave activism.

When I invited Cindy Sheehan to speak at my synagogue, I was deluged by people telling me that she was an anti-Semite. When I invited her to speak at our Network of Spiritual Progressives conference in D.C., again I was deluged by communications from people telling me that her motives were impure, that she was just wanting to get publicity, that she was an opportunist, and that I was hurting our own credibility by having her speak.

I didn't give credence to any of that because the same and worse has been said about me, so I always suspect that anyone receiving that amount of personal negativity is either really bad, or, as I found out in personal contact with Sheehan, someone who has so much goodness and decency and idealism pouring out of her, mixed with righteous indignation, that s/he elicits fear, anger, competitiveness and a desire to eliminate her from public life even by people who agree with her.

Peter Gabel and I have analyzed in Tikkun the way that a hopeful movement or leader often unleashes a complex of feelings, partly of hope, but partly of fear. People remember, either consciously or unconsciously, moments earlier in their lives in which they opened themselves to love, kindness, generosity or hope, and then were deeply disappointed when it was not reciprocated in kind, or when they actually felt humiliated for making themselves vulnerable.

Fear that that humiliation or deep disappointment may happen again leads many to defend themselves against such an outcome by doing everything they can to negate the feelings of hope that are being elicited by a hopeful movement or a leader who is hopeful. Sometimes this will manifest in "acting-out" at a meeting,insisting that "the plan" (whatever it is) cannot possibly work, or that there is no evidence that it will, or that everyone who is involved in the project at hand is really missing the point, or that there is the wrong leadership (the people providing it are deficient in their sensitivity to racism, sexism, homophobia, egotism, process, psychological sensitivity, people who are physically challenged and otherly-abled, or some other similar fault in them). Or they will attack the leadership personally ("she is just out for power") or they will attack the underlying ideology even though they knew what it was before joining this particular group. Or they will complain that a fabulous and brilliant teacher or speaker is speaking too long, or that the email are too long to read--even though they often read books with less substance that are longer or listen to dumb television programs or movies for much longer. People are endlessly inventive in ways to protect themselves from feeling the humiliation that they fear might come back if they were to allow themselves to hope or to believe and work for a world of love, and then act lovingly toward fellow members of their movement or the leadership of the movement.

People tell me that they believe most of my generation "sold out" after the 60s because they wanted the material advantages of the society. But in my experience the most talented, caring, sensitive and creative people I met in movement activities, particularly those who were willing to take the extra personal risks involved in becoming leadership and spokespeople for peace and justice, left the Left not because of a desire for material success, but because they felt abused by others on the Left and in the liberal world who, while agreeing with their ideas, nevertheless found ways to be inhumane, insensititve, and put-downish to others in their movement.

Rumors were spread that claimed that the most idealistic of these people were "really" just out for power, fame or ego-gratification of some sort, and that undercut the effectiveness of these leaders because others responded to them not by listening to their ideas, but by treating them as suspect because of "what they had heard."

Few of those who spread these negative stories really bothered to get to know the people about whom they gossiped, and few ever bothered to acknowledge how destructive this behavior was. But for those who were the objects of this kind of abuse, the feeling of being undercut by people who should have been allies caused personal pain and eventual despair that anything really could ever change. A few of us hung in and remain involved, in my case at least sustained by a personal spiritual practice, but for each 60s activist still involved, there are thousands who are not, who could not stand this way of being treated, and who, when they stick their nose into the dynamics of the present movements of the first decade of the 21st century, quickly discover the same kind of dynamics operating in the Left and in the liberal world.

I've written about this in my book Surplus Powerlessness and in The Left Hand of God, so I'll only say that here in the case of Cindy Sheehan, once again, this movement has pushed away a very decent and ethically-motivated fighter for peace and justice. I only wish I could promise her that she would not experience again the pain that I and others personally experience every day in being involved in social change movements that do not show adequate caring for their activists and leaders.

I'm happy to report that this is not the dynamic in the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and that I'll do everything I can to make sure that it never becomes the dominant reality here. Our spiritual framework, our willingness to talk openly about love, and about the need for compassion for all the ways that each of us fails to be an embodiment of our highest values (including, of course, me and other leaders of our movement) helps a lot. Our message pulls for a more gentle way to be with each other.

But, that's no guarantee: I've watched people verbally beat each other up over who is not compassionate enough? i.e. When people have an unconscious fear and need to protect themselves from opening up to a world of love, they can turn the very idea of love or compassion into a weapon to hurt each other. Nothing protects us but our constant awareness and rededication to embody our values as much as we possibly can, and to be gentle with ourselves and others when we fail in this.

There is another element in Cindy's story that isn't really under our control. The Democratic Party has within it some very idealistic people. But it also has many "realists" who have decided that the only way they can accomplish their idealistic goals is to work within the parameters of "realism" set by the eltes of wealth and power who control funding for campaigns and own the media. Such people, often because they want to accomplish something very good and decent like ending the war, feel that they must distance themselves from the most idealistic people who have put their bodies, reputations, future chances for employment or money on the line and taken to the streets to challenge the system. Those who do so are often quoted by the media only when it sounds as if they are saying something unreasonable or extreme. and then the "realists" working inside the Democratic Party or the Congress or the liberal media feel that their own chances of influencing events will be weakened if they are identified with the more seemingly "extreme" statements of those who have been most courageous in challenging irrational and destructive policies.

So the "realists" try to distance themselves from the idealistic activists, often by putting down the very people who were the first to respond to the ethical crises--the shall we call them "prematurely ethical people." So, the "realists" make it harder for the ethically sensitive activists who first recognized the ethical crisis (and were willing to take personal risks to talk about it) to function politically or be taken seriously by anyone who hasn't personally encountered them.

Democrats who actually do agree with ethically motivated activists end up distancing or even attacking us, or making off-handed remarks to the media whose import is "stay away from her or him--they are too irresponsible or extreme or flakey."

The irony is that the people whom the realists dismiss this way are often the very people whose writings and formulations were what broke through the ethical deadness of the "realists" and made them aware of the need to change policies.

But instead of honoring those who are first out there, the realists instead resent these "prematurely ethical" people and diss them whenever possible, insisting that it is only they, the realists, who can make any real changes in the society. Imagine how disappointing it was to millions of activists when MoveOn began to talk the language of the realists and defend the Democrats for trying to work out compromises with Bush and then eventually capitulating to fund the war. We know how disappointed we were when we couldn't get Move On to send out our message about the Global Marshall Plan and our alternative strategy to end the war. "Spiritual" ideas are also "unrealistic" to the realists, and so they ignore or put us down. And yet, the very ideas that we advance today will be those that in a few years these same people will be telling you that "they always agreed and supported these same goals." Meanwhile, people like Cindy Sheehan get batted around till its hard to remain in that kind of vulnerable public position.

Blessings to all who continue to struggle, each in their own ways, as Cindy Sheehan certainly will, for peace, justice, generosity and love to prevail on our planet.

Rabbi Michael Lerner
RabbiLerner@tikkun.org

Read Cindy's diary here

Congressional Food Stamp Challenge

http://foodstampchallenge.typepad.com/

U.S. Members of Congress to Live on a Food Stamp Budget from May 15-21 Staff and Advocate Groups to Join Challenge

Take the Food Stamp Challenge ~ Live on a Food Stamp Budget for One Week

U.S. Representatives James McGovern (D-MA), Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), and Tim Ryan (D-OH) have pledged to live on an average food stamp budget -- just $3 a day -- from May 15-21, 2007 and have invited other Members of Congress to join them in the Food Stamp Challenge. The spouses of Reps. McGovern and Emerson will also be taking the challenge. A number of advocate groups and Congressional staff are also expected to take part.

Members of Congress are living on a food stamp budget for one week in order to raise visibility and understanding around the challenges that millions of low-income American's face in obtaining a healthy diet under current food stamp benefit levels.

The Farm Bill, which includes the Food Stamp Program, is due to be reauthorized in Congress this year.

Throughout the week, Reps. McGovern, Emerson, Schakowsky, and Ryan as well as others taking part in the challenge, will post their experiences on the Congressional Food Stamp Challenge blog.

Read the Dear Colleague sent by Representatives Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO)

Read the Food Stamp Challenge Registration and Guidelines

To learn more about the Food Stamp Program, visit the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service site.

Sharon Olds, Poet, declines White House Invitation

In a culture like ours, one sometimes forgets the power of a poet's words.

Here is an open letter from the poet Sharon Olds to Laura Bush declining the invitation to read and speak at the National Book Critics Circle Award in Washington, DC. Sharon Olds is one of most widely read and critically acclaimed poets living in America today. Read to the end of the letter to experience her restrained, chilling eloquence.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051010/olds

Laura Bush
First Lady, The White House

Dear Mrs. Bush,
I am writing to let you know why I am not able to accept your kind invitation to give a presentation atthe National Book Festival on September 24, or to attend your dinner at the Library of Congress or the breakfast at the White House. In one way, it's a very appealing invitation. The idea of speaking at a festival attended by 85,000 people is inspiring! The possibility of finding new readers is exciting for a poet in personal terms, and in terms of the desire that poetry serve its constituents--all of us who need the pleasure, and the inner and outer news, it delivers. And the concept of a community of readers and writers has long been dear to my heart. As a professor of creative writing in the graduate school of a major university, I have had the chance to be a part of some magnificent outreach writing workshops in which our students have become teachers. Over the years, they have taught in a variety of settings: a women's prison, several New York City public high schools, an oncology ward for children.

Our initial program, at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challen ged, has been running now for twenty years, creating along the way lasting friendships between young MFA candidates and their students--long-term residents at the hospital who, in their humor, courage and wisdom, become our teachers.When you have witnessed someone nonspeaking and almost nonmoving spell out, with a toe, on a big plastic alphabet chart, letter by letter, his new poem, you have experienced, close up, the passion and essentialness of writing. When you have held up a small cardboard alphabet card for a writer who is completely nonspeaking and nonmoving (except for the eyes), and pointed first to the A, then the B, then C, then D, until you get to the first letter of the first word of the first line of the poem she has been composing in her head all week, and she lifts her eyes when that letter is touched to say yes, you feel with a fresh immediacy the human drive for creation, self-expression, accuracy, honesty and wit--and the importance of writing, which celebrates the value of each person's unique story and song.

So the prospect of a festival of books seemed wonderful to me. I thought of the opportunity to talk about how to start up an outreach program. I thought of the chance to sell some books, sign some books and meet some of the citizens of Washington, DC.

I thought that I could try to find a way, even as your guest, with respect, to speak about my deep feeling that we should not have invaded Iraq, and to declare my belief that the wish to invade another culture and another country--with the resultant loss of life and limb for our brave soldiers, and for the noncombatants in their home terrain--did not come out of our democracy but was instead a decision made "at the top"and forced on the people by distorted language, and by untruths.

I hoped to express the fear that we have begun to live in the shadows of tyranny and religious chauvinism--the opposites of the liberty, tolerance and diversity our nation aspires to.

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you, Mrs. Bush. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.
What kept coming to the fore of my mind was that I would be taking food from the hand of the First Lady who represents the Administration that unleashed this war and that wills its continuation, even to the extent of permitting "extraordinary rendition": flying people to other countries where they will be tortured for us. So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire.

I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I simply could not stomach it.

Sincerely,
SHARON OLDS

U.S. Bars U.N. Observer from Visit to Immigrant Detention Center

From: ACLU E-Newsletter, Texas Challenge to Religion in Schools, DOJ NSA Revelations and More, May 18th, 2007

This month, United Nations Special Rapporteur Dr. Jorge Bustamante is conducting a three-week fact-finding mission in the United States.

As Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, Dr. Bustamante is reviewing the treatment of migrants and immigrants at border facilities and detention centers and meeting with human rights and immigrants’ groups from Arizona to New Jersey.

But midway through Dr. Bustamante’s visit, U.S. officials barred his access to one scheduled stop, the Hutto immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas. The ACLU represents 12 children detained at Hutto, in a challenge charging that they are subject to inhumane treatment. The tour of Hutto a converted prison holding about 400 immigrants, including children and asylum seekers was considered a major part of the Special Rapporteur's U.S. visit.

According to the official terms for fact-finding missions, as an independent expert appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteur must have “access to all prisons, detention centers and places of interrogation.” The terms also mandate that the Rapporteur be given confidential and unsupervised contact with witnesses and potential victims of human rights violations. A letter has been sent to the U.S. State Department and the Department of Homeland Security seeking answers on why the Hutto facility tour was cancelled. To learn more about the Special Rapporteur and the rights of immigrants, and to follow Dr. Bustamante’s U.S. travel activities on the ACLU’s blog, go to: blog.aclu.org/index.php?/categories/13-Immigrants-Rights

Jose Fernando Pedroza died in RC

Professor Calderon of Pitzer College

http://lang.sbsun.com/video/news/050807_calderon_en.asp

http://lang.sbsun.com/video/news/050807_calderon_sp.asp

Fact Check --- the first debates

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/democratic_candidates_debate.html

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/republican_candidates_debate.html

I don't know about you... but when I compare the "facts" that were debatable... there is a group of candidates that are clearly the more disingenious...

Kucinich: When Others Were Silent

WILPF honors Dr. Martin Luther King 40 years after Riverside Church Speech: A Time to Break the Silence

Forty years ago on April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King stood in the pulpit of Riverside Church and stated his opposition to the war in Vietnam. In that speech, entitled “Beyond Vietnam” Dr. King not only stated his opposition to the war but his opposition to violence itself. Dr. King understood the correlation with war abroad and violence within our own society. As he pointed out in his speech, it was difficult to talk of nonviolence when the government was committing violence.

A section of his speech is as appropriate now as it was then:

“The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American Life and policy.”

How prophetic!

From the beginning, WILPF has recognized the connection between peace and freedom and is reflected in our present program work. Like Dr. King, we believe that the settling of differences through war is not just. Like Dr. King, we believe that a country that spends more money on the military than on the social and economic uplift of its people is on the path of self-destruction.
Listen to the speech here:

http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/KINM003.shtml

Full text of speech:
Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence
Republished from American Rhetoric

I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.
I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.
Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellowed [sic] Americans, *who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.* There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954** [sic]; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence *in 1954* -- in 1945 *rather* -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.
After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. *Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.
Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies.* What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.
How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than *eight hundred, or rather,* eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

*I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

• Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.


• Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.


• Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.


• Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.


• Five: *Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing...part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile... meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

*As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.* These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

*This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations.* These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. *We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.*

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: "Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love." "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us." Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says:

"Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong

Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim
unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.

If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

If we will but make the right choice, we will be able to speed up the day, all over America and all over the world, when justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Alternative Text Source:

http://www.africanamericans.com/MLKjrBeyondVietnam.htm
* = text within single asterisks absent from the audio
** King stated "1954." That year was notable for the Civil Rights Movement in the USSC's Brown v. Board of Education ruling. However, given the statement's discursive thrust, King may have meant to say "1964" -- the year he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Alternatively, as noted by Steve Goldberg, King may have identified 1954's "burden of responsibility" as the year he became a minister.
External Link: http://www.mlkmemorial.org/
External Link: http://www.thekingcenter.org/

Jeannette Rankin: This Is No Time to be Polite

Jeannette Rankin: This Is No Time to be Polite
Jennifer Murphy
March 29, 2007 5:25 PM

You can no more win a war than an earthquake.
So said Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the US House of Representatives and the first female member of Congress. A new film about Rankin, A Single Woman, is in the final stages of completion and will be screened publicly for the first time this Saturday in Los Angeles. Sonali Kolhatkar interviewed the filmmakers Thursday on her KPFK program Uprising.

A Single Woman was first drafted as a one-woman show by Jeanmarie Simpson in 2004. It toured the country in grassroots performances for over two years. Simpson, artistic director of the Nevada Shakespeare Company, first discovered Rankin on Google. She says she knew within a few minutes of reading that "this was the character she'd been looking for her whole life."
"I'd never played a character like this before. Every word she said is something I wish I'd said."

Filmmaker Kamala Lopez-Dawson saw the play in New York and conceived the idea of creating a film using visual art and greenscreen technology to translate the live performance. The film will be released this summer in partnership with Heroica Films and Peace Path Pictures. It will be screened this Saturday at the home of Frank Dorrel, longtime local peace activist and publisher of Addicted to War.

There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be
reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense; for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, was elected on November 7, 1916. She ran on a platform of peace and women's rights, and against child labor. Just four days into her term, the House voted on the resolution to enter World War I. Rankin cast one of 50 votes against the resolution, earning her immediate vilification from the press. Suffrage groups even cancelled her speaking engagements. But she would not waver in her anti-war stance. "This is no time to be polite," she said.

In 1917, she opened the congressional debate on the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, which became the 19th Amendment, granting women's right to vote in 1920.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, she once again voted against entering a World War, the only member of Congress to do so, saying "As a woman, I can't go to war and I refuse to send anyone else. I vote 'NO.'" She believed that Roosevelt had deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbor. She was denounced by the press and her colleagues, and barely escaped an angry mob.

She was founding Vice-President of the American Civil Liberties Union and a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Jeanmarie Simpson says of Rankin "She learned out loud -- in public." She started out working within the system, achieving much but never succeeding in her goal of keeping the country out of a series of wars. By the Vietnam war era, she had taken to the streets. A fan of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, she led more than 5,000 women who called themselves "The Jeannette Rankin Brigade" to the United States Capitol to demonstrate their opposition to US involvement in that war. Rankin said "If we had 10,000 mothers willing to go to prison, we could end this war."

Rankin died at age 92 in 1973, bequeathing her property to help "mature, unemployed women workers." This was the seed money for the Jeannette Rankin Foundation that gives educational grants annually to low-income women all across the United States.

Jeannette Rankin's life is a little-known example of the power one person can have as a world changer. In this current time of war, her story is a resource and an inspiration.

The filmmakers are currently raising money to complete A Single Woman. They hope for a good showing at the film festivals this summer and to find a "distributor of note like Sony Pictures Classics." Many celebrities have contributed their voices and music to the film including Peter Coyote, Joni Mitchell and Judd Nelson (who will be at the Saturday screening). Other special guests include Jeanmarie Simpson, Kamala Lopez-Dawson, S. Brian Wilson, Mimi Kennedy and Cindy Sheehan.

Dahlia S. Wasfi, M.D. Congressional Testimony

http://www.liberatethis.com/index.html
Dahlia S. Wasfi, M.D. Congressional Testimony

Conn. lawmaker changes debate by coming out

Ethan Jacobs ejacobs@baywindows.com
Rep. Beth Bye. Photo: Connecticut House Democrats.

It’s no exaggeration to say that by coming out to her fellow judiciary committee members at the April 12 committee hearing on a same-sex marriage bill, Connecticut state Rep. Beth Bye helped change the course of the same-sex marriage movement in Connecticut. Not that Bye was in the closet; the freshman lawmaker ran for office as an openly gay candidate and received the endorsement of the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, and she lists her partner Tracey in her biography on her official website. But as a new lawmaker who had been relatively silent up until that hearing on LGBT issues, she estimates at least half of her colleagues on the committee were unaware she was gay. That all changed when she addressed the committee and told them that, unlike the other lawmakers debating the pros and cons of same-sex marriage, she actually understood the issue firsthand because she and her partner were in a civil union.

Bye told the story of how her father, a devout Catholic who didn’t attend his brother’s wedding because the brother had been divorced, was supportive of her relationship to her partner, Tracey, and treated the two of them as a married couple. She described her father walking down the aisle during their civil union ceremony and lighting a unity candle with Tracey’s father.

Bye also spoke in personal terms about why the state’s civil union law did not go far enough. She talked about going for her mammogram appointment and, under the section of the medical form asking her marital status, being forced to check “other” because it was the only option that fit. On her partner’s pension fund, she said she was listed as “husband.”

“Though some of you may say, ‘Oh, they’re just trivial differences,’ I’m the only one sitting here who’s living it every day, and I tell you, it’s not trivial. I am other. I hope one day to be married in the eyes of the civil law, and forgive me if I’m not patient. I don’t think it’s a thing that’s just a matter of time. I don’t want to be other anymore. I want to be married,” said Bye.

Throughout her speech Bye repeatedly and visibly fought to hold back tears, and she was particularly overcome when describing how her father understood that being gay was an essential part of who she was, just as being athletic and being curious were essential parts of her being. She joked at the hearing that by tearing up she had condemned herself to winding up on the front of the paper, and she was right; the next day the Hartford Courant ran a photo of her on its front page holding her head in her hands after breaking down in tears. Bye told Bay Windows she was unprepared for her own emotional reaction to talking about being gay.

“I was more emotional than I wanted to be in my testimony,” said Bye. “I realized I don’t think I ever in public called myself gay, so in my speech … when I said, ‘I am gay,’ I just have to say, it just welled up inside of me like, I’ve never said that.”

Yet it may have been that display of emotion that led to a vote that was beyond the expectations of same-sex marriage supporters. Bye said lawmakers and advocates pushing for this session’s same-sex marriage bill did not expect it pass the legislature, but they hoped to hold hearings on the bill and pass it out of the House judiciary committee to build the groundwork for its passage in later sessions. Both Bye and Anne Stanback, executive director of Love Makes a Family, the lead same-sex marriage advocacy organization in the state, said they expected the same-sex marriage bill to pass in the committee by at most one or two votes. Then Bye gave her speech, and the old plan went out the window. The marriage bill won in the committee by a staggering 27-15 vote.

“It was one of those days where everything went right and all of our swing votes swung the right way,” said Stanback. “I tend to be the eternal optimist and I hadn’t given up on any of them, but what we thought was going to happen was we would win by maybe a vote.”

Stanback said Bye’s speech proved a decisive factor in getting members of the committee to support the bill.

“She really put herself out there and spoke from the heart, and that is exactly what moved legislators. It moved them when they heard it from constituents, but it moves them in a whole different way when they hear it from a colleague, and especially a colleague they like and respect as much as Beth,” said Stanback.

There were other factors that helped tip the balance on the committee in favor of the marriage proponents. Both of the chairs of the judiciary committee, Sen. Andrew McDonald and Rep. Michael Lawlor, are openly gay, and Bye said both of them repeatedly urged their colleagues not to cast a vote that would place them “on the wrong side of history.” Stanback said opponents of same-sex marriage on the committee made speeches full of “misinformation and fear,” turning off potential fence-sitters.

The end result of that vote was that the same-sex marriage bill has far more momentum than proponents anticipated.

“I really think we underestimated, me too, how far this could go this year … I really think the momentum came in that meeting, some of it,” said Bye. “There aren’t many surprises by the time you get to vote, but it’s just a sign of how close Connecticut residents are, it’s like there are more people on the fence than we thought. It’s a sign that the movement is moving faster than anticipated. People are seeing their way to accept this, and [with the creation of] civil unions, the sky is not falling.”

Stanback said Love Makes a Family and its allies are currently counting heads in preparation for a House vote on the marriage legislation. They are lining up their supporters, identifying potential swing votes, and making contact with those swings to try to sway them to their side. House Speaker James Amann opposes same-sex marriage but told the Connecticut Post that if proponents of the bill pull together a majority to support it, he will allow it to come up for a debate. Stanback said Love Makes a Family will be working over the next couple weeks to try to pull together that majority.

“I think if we can get close and continue the momentum that we have right now, we can convince him to have a vote, even if we’re a few votes short. We have seen at every step of the way, in the civil union debate two years ago and in the judiciary public debate this year, those debates, which for some bills are just wasted time, in this case they really do have an impact,” said Stanback. She said a House debate on the marriage bill is likely to shift even more support to their side.

Another obstacle facing the marriage bill is Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who has repeatedly said she opposes same-sex marriage, despite signing the civil union law. Stanback said Rell’s opposition has not dissuaded Love Makes a Family’s efforts, and she believes Rell can be moved. She said she hopes to have Rell meet same-sex couples to listen to their personal stories about marriage and civil unions, saying that similar meetings have changed the minds of many lawmakers.

“I just am not willing to accept [Rell’s stated opposition to same-sex marriage] as a final word,” said Stanback.

As for Bye, she said the response she has received from her colleagues has been uniformly positive and supportive. She received a steady stream of positive e-mails from people in her district, and the handful of negative e-mails she received came from outside the district.

Bye said the speech was a departure from how she normally approaches talking to people about being gay. She prefers educating people by simply living her life openly and proudly. Bye and her partner hosted dinners for the freshman lawmakers at their home on multiple occasions, and she also invited the legislature’s female lawmakers into her home.

“I did make a point to have people over here but not have a speech about gay rights so people could see, it’s just the everyday,” said Bye.

Yet after speaking with advocates and her colleagues pushing for the amendment, she realized her personal story could help sway people in the debate.

“When it came time to vote, I couldn’t not say anything as the only one sitting there with a civil union,” said Bye.

Maher Blasts Regent Law School’s Transformation of the DoJ

Maher Blasts Regent Law School’s Transformation of the DoJ
By: SilentPatriot on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 1:33 PM - PDT

On "Real Time" last night, Bill Maher laced into Monica Goodling and the Bush administration for appointing more than 150 graduates of a tier 4 law school to prominent position in the US government.

"Republicans run for office claiming 'government doesn't work'. They get elected and then prove it." ~Al Franken