Zinn Zingers: Right Then, Right Now

The Women Disobey protest against US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) “zero tolerance” policy separation children and families at the US/Mexico border. 28 June 2018. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Sarahmirk .

By Kathie MM

Believers in peace and human rights are reeling from national symptoms of fascism, racism, and  violent responses to engineered fear and misdirected rage–and now on top of everything else, an opening in the Supreme Court.

But, there’s an antidote to despair in The Progressive’s  2005 article from Howard Zinn.

Here are a few excerpts, reminding us: we have overcome before–and can do so again.

“It would be naive to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice….

The rights of working people, of women, of black people have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the other branches of the political system, the courts have recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for themselves….

Knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our culture–the media, the educational system–tries to crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system. That is why Cindy Sheehan’s dramatic stand in Crawford, Texas, leading to 1,600 anti-war vigils around the country, involving 100,000 people, is more crucial to the future of American democracy than [particular judicial hearings and appointments]…”

There’s gold in them there words.  Keep the faith. Heed the call.

SED Student Helps Bring Israeli, Palestinian Youth Together

by Joel Brown

Dana Dunwoody (SED’19) (above) spent part of her summer using disc games to bring Israeli and Palestinian youth together at the Ultimate Peace camp in southern Israel. Photos courtesy of Ultimate Peace.

By Joel Brown

Just about everyone has tossed around a Frisbee for fun. Dana Dunwoody is doing it for peace. At a summer camp in an Israeli desert, she is using the flying discs to bring together Israeli and Palestinian youth—and maybe change the world, one toss at time.“As youths, we get inundated with information about who we are and what our cultures are, and when there’s a lot of violence and hostility going on, there’s a lot of misinterpretation,” says Dunwoody (SED’19), a doctoral candidate in applied human development. “To be able to come together and realize, I can have a say in changing that narrative, is a very empowering experience.”This is Dunwoody’s second stint as a volunteer counselor at the Ultimate Peace camp. Using the grounds of an Israeli boarding school for a week each summer since 2007, the organization strives to build ties between Israeli and West Bank youths. It does that with Ultimate, a game that’s extremely competitive, but depends heavily on teamwork and sportsmanship. The 200 or so 10-to-16-year-old campers come for the hours of practice and games each day. They have some fun away from the burdens of daily life in that conflict-wracked corner of the world, and if things go the way they are supposed to go, they begin to see one another differently.“We encourage conversation and sharing of culture,” says Dunwoody, who has a bachelor’s in psychology from Temple University and a master’s in athletic counseling from Springfield College. “We have a lot of different activities the kids do together to create safe spaces to share their identities and explore other cultures.”

Dana Dunwoody speaking with camper

Dunwoody uses her skills as an educator and athletic coach to help campers find ways to get along.

Mostly, though, there is Ultimate.

Flying-disc sports are a lot more organized than they were in the peace-and-love days of the 1960s. Millions of people in the United States regularly play Ultimate, which is not officially called Ultimate Frisbee because Frisbee is a Wham-O trademark. Long Island native Dunwoody picked it up as an undergrad and quickly became an avid player.

“You hear about these opportunities to use Ultimate culture as a way to connect people,” she says. Ultimate Peace, created by Ultimate-loving Americans and one Israeli, also offers a year-round program that brings Israeli and Palestinian youth together to play the game.

In Ultimate, the disc is advanced only by passing—players cannot run with the disc—and a team scores a point when one of its players catches the disc in the other team’s end zone. Most important, as far as Ultimate Peace is concerned, there is no referee, so players must call their own fouls.

According to USA Ultimate’s “Ultimate in 10 Simple Rules,” “Ultimate stresses sportsmanship and fair play. Competitive play is encouraged, but never at the expense of respect between players, adherence to the rules, and the basic joy of play.”

“The spirit of the game infiltrates all parts of your being,” says Dunwoody. “For me it feels like it’s alive. Every person manifests it in the way they communicate with you on and off the field. At Ultimate Peace, it’s mutual respect, but it’s also integrity and collaboration and cooperation.”

“The Ultimate Peace project is an example of sport for good, or sport for development, which is kind of an emerging field,” says Dunwoody’s faculty advisor John McCarthy (SED’98, SED’04), a School of Education clinical associate professor and director of the Institute for Athletic Coach Education. “These projects hold so much promise in areas where a lot of people have struggled and there are some really deep societal problems.”

“Dana’s very committed to social justice,” McCarthy says. “This project brings together a lot of her passions: social justice and her energy for using sport and exercise as a vehicle for positive change and just her kind of caring for other people.”

None of which surprises McCarthy. Dunwoody is SED’s first Holmes Scholar, and was elected national president of the program for 2017 to 2019. The Holmes Scholar Program, which is overseen by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education provides mentorship, peer support, and professional development to students from historically underrepresented backgrounds.

“She’s a bright light,” McCarthy says. “She can do a lot of good for a lot of people.”

Honoring a national hero, Part 1.

Andrew Bacevich, from Boston University, speaks a panel discussion at the 2012 Current Strategy Forum at the U.S. Naval War College focusing on global trends and the implications they have on national policy and maritime forces. File is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: U.S. Naval War College.

by Kathleen Malley-Morrison

What a stinking mess this election year has been!  People on all sides fed up with governmental corruption, enraged by an economic system that seems biased against them, terrified by the threats personified by groups labeled as terrorists, longing for past days when they felt they had at least some control over their lives and their futures, and looking for someone, anyone, who can get them out of this mess and back to “normal.”

And for some of us there is the dismay that Bernie Sanders–our beacon of hope, our image of progressive values, our embodiment of a more genuine democracy—was cheated out of the chance to become our leader.  But he is not the national hero who is my focus today.

My national hero of the day is Andrew Bacevich, a retired career officer of the U.S. Army, a man of enormous courage who has been speaking out against American militarism for decades.   Bacevich has just published a brilliant article on the decay of American democracy, which should be required reading for all.

The main questions Bacevich proposes are:

“How did the party of Eisenhower, an architect of victory in World War II, choose as its nominee a narcissistic TV celebrity who, with each successive Tweet and verbal outburst, offers further evidence that he is totally unequipped for high office? …. Similarly, how did the party of Adlai Stevenson, but also of Stevenson’s hero Franklin Roosevelt, select as its candidate someone so widely disliked and mistrusted even by many of her fellow Democrats?”

Bacevich’s analysis of the characters, strategies, and flaws of both Clinton and Trump are chillingly convincing and well worth reading; however, he warns us:

“But let’s not just blame the candidates.  Trump and Clinton are also the product of circumstances that neither created.  As candidates, they are merely exploiting a situation — one relying on intuition and vast stores of brashness, the other putting to work skills gained during a life spent studying how to acquire and employ power.  The success both have achieved in securing the nominations of their parties is evidence of far more fundamental forces at work.”

In my next post, I will share his views on those forces.

Self-evident or reserved for the power elite? Part 1.

 

A depiction of the Second Continental Congress voting on the United States Declaration of Independence Date between 1784 and 1801. Source: Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that “faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain” and therefore also in the public domain in the United States.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

Yup, that is an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, the lofty document presumed to have legitimized and legalized the separation of 13 British colonies from Great Britain back in 1776.

So, we might well ask, as we celebrate the achievements heralded in that document, have subsequent generations of Americans honored and promulgated those principles?

Uh, oh. The answer seems to be: Not unless it suited the interests of the ruling powers within the nation to do so.

On July 5, 1852, 76 years after the Declaration of Independence, the great American Frederick Douglass gave a speech that rings all too true today.  Here are some excerpts:

“The blessings in which you this day rejoice are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence bequeathed by your fathers is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony….

Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them….

To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world….

Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future. Standing with God and the crushed and bleeding slave on this occasion, I will, in the name of humanity, which is outraged, in the name of liberty, which is fettered, in the name of the Constitution and the Bible, which are disregarded and trampled upon, dare to call in question and to denounce, with all the emphasis I can command, everything that serves to perpetuate slavery — the great sin and shame of America! ‘I will not equivocate – I will not excuse.’”

And what about us, 240 years since that historic 4th of July? Will we excuse the racists, the elitists, and the deniers of liberty and democracy within our own country, or will we SPEAK OUT, will we ADVOCATE for ALTERNATIVES to HATRED and AUTHORITARIANISM (AHA!)?