Tag: Helen Keller

A plea for sanity and virtue, Part 2

Posted on by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

Is the sun rising or setting on all of us?
Kathie MM

Part Two: Resurrecting the Wisdom and Spirit of Helen Keller, Dorothy Day, Molly Ivins, Martin Luther King, and Howard Zinn

In The United States of Amnesia, governed by Weapons of Mass Dysfunction, we daily witness America’s devolution into barbarism.

Therefore, it is better to swim against the current than to be swept over the cliff.

Collective Awakening is ever more necessary for the restoration of sanity and virtue in a republic apparently intent on self-destruction.

Insofar as the Republican Party is now wholly lost to the forces of sexism, racism, militarism, sophistry, empire, xenophobia, economic apartheid, ecological suicide, fear mongering, war making, science denial, and religious extremism – i.e., a polymorphous perversity of elephantiastical greed, bigotry and delusion, committed to the total overthrow of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal for the American people – and insofar as multi-party pluralism in a two-party system sold to the mega-wealthy is now and in the near future off the table, our best hope for a brighter future is for the Democratic Party to regain its heart and soul; both of which were lost at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, when it betrayed the Civil Rights and Peace Movements it was obliged to embody in the spirit of our assassinated hero, Robert F. Kennedy.

Karl Marx urged egalitarian economics, arguing that each person has a right to the material security which allows for self-realization and creative service, free from oppressive constraints.  Buddha taught the same.

Which is why the Dalai Lama consistently teaches “a common religion of kindness,” committed to nuclear disarmament, global peace, ecological pragmatism, economic security for all, and lifelong free education in a planetary community where the institutions of society serve schools (and not, as at present, the other way around).  What the Dalai Lama urges and teaches is nothing less than a Global Enlightenment Project.

Also, it might be worthwhile to remind people that if they have a Social Security card, they are a card carrying socialist.

There are today strong voices in Congress urging a restoration of sanity and virtue.  They remain too few, and the forces arrayed against them are strong indeed; but those voices are a beacon of hope, and they deserve our support because they recognize the following:

People before profits = The Sermon on The Mount = The Golden Rule at the heart of The Torah = Heart Centered Rationality = Ahimsa = “Right Vocation” in Buddha’s 8-Fold Path = Covenant = universal health care = Ecosocialism.

CRAZY WISDOM

Posted on by kathiemm

By Stefan Schindler

 Do you occasionally feel that you’re about to go crazy? Or think that perhaps you already have? Do you often feel like Don Quixote, vainly tilting at windmills? Yes, probably. But then you remember the meaning of the term Greater Fool. A Greater Fool is one who exhibits greatness in commitment to peace, no matter how foolish that commitment seems in a world intent on going mad.

You remember that you are not alone. You have comrades. Millions of brothers and sisters equally committed to kindness and compassion. They too are Greater Fools, like Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, Romero, Tolstoy, Emerson, Tagore. Like Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, Vandana Shiva, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein. Like Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali. Like Mark Twain, William James, Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Moore, Howard Zinn. Like Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, George Fox, Matthew Fox, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama. Like Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, Susan Sarandon, the Trung sisters of Vietnam. Like Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. John and Robert Kennedy, too. Greater Fools, one and all.

And, yes, The Beatles. “All you need is love,” they sang, and you hum it every day. War without end seems to be the world’s way, and yet you never cease to chant, “Give peace a chance.” The Statue of Liberty weeps. Mother Earth is crucified. Storm clouds darken the horizon. And yet you sing: “Here comes the sun.” Yes, I am you, you are me, and we are all the walrus. We have each other. We keep the faith. We persevere.

Chogyam Trungpa, combining Tibetan Buddhism and Zen, called it Crazy Wisdom. So, yes, it’s OK to be a little crazy, as long as your craziness is that of the Greater Fool. Humanity may elect lunatics for leaders, and go about their business sleepwalking through history. Yet you, at least, are awake. Indeed, you are part of The Great Awakening. You belong to The Global Peace Abbey. It welcomes all and has no walls. We are warriors for peace, on the cutting edge of evolution. There is no greater satisfaction, no greater joy, no greater service.

So rejoice, my friend. The angels sing your praises, and lend you unconditional support. The reward for service is increased opportunity to serve.

Enlightenment and Social Hope, Part 4

Posted on by kathiemm

For Enlightenment by Kathie Malley-Morrison

By Stefan Schindler

The recent triumph of anti-democratic Republican Party politics was made possible with the criminal complicity of the Democratic Party, the mainstream news media, and the rise to political power of Christian fundamentalism.

In the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes, and then appointed George W. Bush the winner, in what was nothing less than a judicial coup d’état.

The Cheney-Bush Administration then launched a lie-based war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of which now exceeds two trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East, and widespread Muslim hatred of America. In 2008, the Cheney-Bush Administration climaxed its reign of deficit spending and global terror with a domestic economic meltdown which saw American citizens suffer the greatest recession since the  Depression of the 1930s.

Meanwhile, America’s homegrown economic apartheid becomes more extreme with every passing week; the Pentagon budget blooms to finance more wars; fifty percent of university teachers are slave-wage adjuncts; more than fifty million Americans are deprived of healthcare; and the planet careens toward nuclear war and ecological apocalypse.

Hence we might conclude that Immanuel Kant implicitly points to a national motto that ought to read: “Treat all people always as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means” to personal gain.

Hence also – as Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, I. F. Stone, Buckminster Fuller, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, Dot Walsh, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis and Meg Randa, Howard Zinn and John Lennon would applaud – we should revise America’s Pledge of Allegiance to read:

“I pledge allegiance to the planet, and to all the people and creatures on her; one ecosystem, universally sacred, with nourishment and beauty for all.”

 

Just for a change: Messages to live by

Posted on by kathiemm

Let Us Beat Swords Into Plowshares statue at the United Nations Headquarters, New York City.Photograph credit: Rodsan18. In the public domain.

by Kathie MM

As currently envisioned, the U.S. Peace Memorial  will consist of twelve walls, or facets, containing engraved peace quotes from famous Americans (including, for example, Noam Chomsky, Martin Luther King Jr., Jeanette Rankin, Margaret Mead, Albert Einstein) as well as lesser-known figures.

Today, for your continuing inspiration, we share some of the quotations under consideration. Embrace them.

“We must devise a system in which Peace is more rewarding than War.”

Margaret Mead (1901-1978).

 

 

“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969).

 

“It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).

 

“The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

 

“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought.”

Helen Keller (1880-1968).

 

“No, I am not going 10,000 miles to help murder kill and burn other people to simply help continue the domination of white slavemasters over dark people …”

Muhammad Ali (1942-2016).

 

“[t]here was never a good War, or a bad Peace.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).

 

“I believe that the killing of human beings in a war is no better than common murder.”

Albert Einstein (1879-1955).

 

“I am an anti-imperialist.  I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

Mark Twain, pseudonym for Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910).

 

“We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”

Jimmy Carter (1924-  ).

 

“I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”

George S. McGovern (1922-2012).

 

“How can you make a war on terror, if war itself is terrorism?”

Howard Zinn (1922-2010).

 

“… all war is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal, …”

John Steinbeck (1902-1968).

 

“… he who is the author of a war, lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.”

Thomas Paine (1737-1809).