Stand Up!, Gordon Whitman tells us, “is a guide to answering the knock at your door asking you to join other people to change the world.” Millions of people are doing just that; activism is resurging at every level of society, including your community. Join in.
A local example:
The evening of Trump’s State of the Union address, the Social Action Committee of Temple B’nai Brith in Somerville offered a compelling program. The evening began with a screening of Frontline’s “Betting on Trump” (www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8X4qDDgj20&list=PL_pPc6-R9ZzZAb_MFeVVSWlt2L3YyqpL), which focused on Trump voters in a declining coal mining town, a dying industrial city, and a drought-stricken farming area. These were not racist, anti-immigrant, or hateful people, but rather desperate family members seeing themselves abandoned by political leaders offering no hope for change.
The evening’s discussant was Michael Connolly, who grew up in public housing, attended college on a football scholarship, and ran successfully in 2016 for the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
Mike pointed to some remarkable realities: The life expectancy of middle-aged U.S. white men has declined in recent years. Over the last 10 years, the suicide rate in Massachusetts has risen 50 %. Nationally, all the gains in private wealth have gone to the wealthy. In Boston, the wealth of the average person of color is $8. The majority of people under 35 have no faith in capitalism.
Mike pointed to the rise of neo-liberalism, which takes from the public realm to give to the private sector, and promotes austerity as the solution to problems. The state of Massachusetts is now operating with a budget more than $3 billion smaller than 15 years ago.
Mike argued that we should be working toward a society where all people are guaranteed healthcare, housing, and education. Just think! For only $300 million a year, we could make all public universities and community colleges tuition-free in Massachusetts.
Some audience members had gathered signatures to put the Fair Share amendment on the 2018 ballot. The amendment would levy a 4% tax on people with incomes over a million dollars, raising revenues of $2 billion annually. Those revenues would allow Massachusetts to provide a decent life to many more of its citizens.
If you would like to see greater educational opportunity, less income inequality, and a more just society, be another first responder to Stand up with others who seek those goals.
Martin Luther King Jr, at a press conference / World Telegram & Sun photo by Walter Albertin, 8 June 1964. No known copyright restrictions
One Hundred Contemporary Exemplars of Peace Advocacy and Activism: The First Fifty
by Kathie Malley-Morrison & Anthony J. Marsella
During this week, while we are honoring one of America’s greatest heroes, a man who personified many of the highest ethical values for which human beings can strive, we want to honor other activists promoting peace, social justice, and preservation of the earth. We are proposing 100 names — 50 today and 50 in the next post — for your consideration. It is a diverse list–with men and women from a broad range of nations, a variety of religious faiths, and a rainbow of skin colors.
Some of the names are likely to be familiar to you; others may not be. You can click on each name to learn about that person and what he or she has done to earn our recognition. Please send us your own nominations for membership in this group of leaders, with links to sites describing their efforts.
9/11 Memorial logo. Author: National September 11 Memorial & Museum. In the public domain.
Monday, September 11, 2017
By Barbara Kidney
The Continuing Horror of 9/11
Sixteen years later, and tragically, the horrific legacy of 9/11 lives on. Manhattan is my home town. My Mom, like her own Mom, had been born in Manhattan. My Dad (the the Irish-American Brooklynite) worked on Maiden Lane, in lower Manhattan. He had been retired for many years at the time of 9/11, and I had left even more years ago.
At the time of the 9/11 attack, I was living in the Hudson Valley, with friends & neighbors working in Manhattan, including possibly my own husband, working as courier driver. Eventually I found out that no one close to me had died in the attack, but the brother of an acquaintance (the brother had been a Manhattan chef) was killed, and the young adult son of a lovely, typically cheerful friend of mine, on his way to visit his fiancé across the country, was on board one of the planes that hit the towers.
People caught in the attack, NYC Transit workers, police, firefighters, EMT and other emergency personnel, exerted heroic efforts to prevent further deaths and to otherwise respond to the tragedy. As a native of NYC, I certainly was not at all surprised to hear of the various stories of sudden heroism by ordinary New Yorkers, who typically rise to such occasions with down-to-earth decency, humble and amazing courage, and competence. Many of these have had their lives impeded and shortened by harm to their health, from the asbestos and toxins they breathed in, from the lack of protective equipment, and from our nation’s unique failure to provide adequate healthcare to all but the wealthy and the electeds.
And, I am proud to say, like so many of my fellow New Yorkers, including those who lost loved ones in the attack, the very last thing I wanted to have happen after 9/11 was for more civilians to be violently attacked and killed. The last thing we wanted to have happen is for normal humans doing normal activities – people caring for their babies, caring for each other, caring for their pets, going to their jobs, taking their kids to school, growing crops (and flowers), creating art, healing the sick, making music, pursuing scientific enquiry, falling in love- the last thing we wanted after that hellish day, was to have some Americans choose to continue the work of the devil, and go around bombing people, who are just trying to live their lives in their own communities.
However, the very thing we most abhor, the killing of other humans, just trying to live their own human lives, was what those Americans with the most decision-making power chose to do. After arranging for Bin Laden’s family in the U.S to be flown safely out of the US without questioning right after 9/11, W. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, chose to violently kill, maim, torture Afghanis and Iraqis.
Had the governments of Afghanistan or Iraq declared war on us or even attacked us? No, they had not. Which country, besides possibly our own, was most responsible, for 9/11? Our dear friend, Saudi Arabia, to whom we give billions of US tax money for their weapons of terrorism – W. Bush, Obama, Trump…one thing these presidents all have in common is that. Many self-identified liberals and progressives opposed the invasion of Iraq during the W. Bush years, but then supported the US war on the Middle East during the Obama years.
According to well-respected human rights institutions such as Amnesty International, Reprieve, and Human Rights Watch, US military violence in the Middle East has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, displaced millions, and under Obama, sneak drone murders of civilians in several countries has increased about tenfold compared to W., resulting in thousands of civilians being murdered, and Trump continues the dronings. I use the word “murders” advisedly – bombing people with drones operated across the world, and then bombing the first-responders who come to render aid to the victims, is officially a crime according to international courts of justice, as well to anyone with the least exacting of moral compasses.
US presidents have much decision-making power, but it takes the many to empower their decisions. So many ways to enable US military terrorism. Even though US wars and other military actions have been unjust and often illegal according to international standards, join the military or the National Guard, encourage young people to do so, and thank military members for their service (to Commanders-in-Chief with track records of violently sociopathic policy decisions).
Repeat the malarkey that the US military defends our freedoms (no, we do not have the freedom to kill people in other countries. Are they invading us? No, we are invading them. Are they threatening our Bill of Rights? No, we are doing that to ourselves, with, for example, the “Patriot” Acts, NSA, and Border Patrol allowed to do whatever they want to whomever they want, whenever). Repeat the malarkey that US military are all heroes. Keep silent when others mouth the malarkey. Never speak up about the blatant immorality of US declared and undeclared wars and the drone murders. Never join or support a peace group. Call violence “patriotic” and call failure to support mass murder “unpatriotic,” call those who try to protect their communities against US military violence “insurgents” like that’s a bad thing (hey, remember 1776 – who were the insurgents then?). And when you hear others speak this way, be sure to remain silent. Never write a letter to the editor against US military decisions, never contact your electeds to protest US military actions.
Because fact is, those who can decide to initiate violent militaristic activities, would be utterly helpless to enact them, if it weren’t for all the myriad enablers making all those atrocities possible.
Special acknowledgement to all who remain silent about all that- the ongoing hellish legacy of 9/11 would be impossible without you. So, about three thousand people killed on 9/11/01, and since then, via military actions, the US has killed or otherwise adversely impacted well over a million people, who had, incidentally, nothing to do with 9/11.
To those who did have something to do with 9/11, we continue to give heaps of our tax money and weapons. Can we stop yet? Can we stop the hellish legacy of 9/11? A reminder – in sharp contrast to the Democratic Party, as well as to the Republican Party, the Green Party accepts no corporate (think arms and drone manufacturers) funding, and the official political platform of the Green Party clearly supports peace. Thou shalt not kill. Is this really such a hard directive to follow? What will you do?
Barbara Kidney, Ph.D., a counseling psychologist in private practice, resides in the Hudson Valley of NYS and does what she can to promote the welfare of Earth and Earthlings. She is a member of American Psychological Association’s Division 48, the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence, and a founding member of Hudson Valley Green Party and of the Drone Alert – Hudson Valley project 2012 – 2015.
by Display at the My Lai Memorial This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Author: Gonzo Gooner.
by Kathie MM
“Dementia is progressive loss of cognitive function, marked by memory problems and confused thinking.” Although Psychology Today claims that the “most common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s Disease, a fatal condition that affects more than 5 million Americans,” there are much more serious and more widespread forms of memory disorder with extremely high mortality rates.
I am referring here to the disease that John Dower labels “Memory Loss in the Garden of Violence: How Americans Remember (and Forget) Their Wars.” Dower attributes selective memory loss regarding the country’s role in deadly wars to “victim consciousness.”
To illustrate, he says: “Certain traumatic historical moments such as ‘the Alamo’ and ‘Pearl Harbor’ have become code words…for reinforcing the remembrance of American victimization at the hands of nefarious antagonists. Thomas Jefferson and his peers actually established the baseline for this in the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which enshrines recollection of ‘the merciless Indian Savages’ — a self-righteous demonization that turned out to be boilerplate for a succession of later perceived enemies. ‘September 11th’ has taken its place in this deep-seated invocation of violated innocence.”
In his powerful essay, Dower provides appalling evidence of U.S. “terror bombing” around the world. Regarding the Korean War, he quotes General Curtis LeMay, who acknowledges, “We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both… We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes…”
As for the infamous war in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Dower comments, “’targeting’ everything that moved’ was virtually a mantra among U.S. fighting forces, a kind of password that legitimized indiscriminate slaughter.”
Dower also diagnoses the current symptoms of saber-rattling between the U.S. and North Korea, suggesting, “To Americans and much of the rest of the world, Kim Jong-un seems irrational, to say the least. Yet in rattling his miniscule nuclear quiver, he is really joining the long-established game of ‘nuclear deterrence,’ and practicing what is known among American strategists as the ‘madman theory’…. most famously associated with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War, but in fact. .. more or less imbedded in U.S. nuclear game plans.”
My prescription for treatment: Let’s work on developing an antidote to the dementia enshrouding the country’s military aggression and spreading symptoms of victimization and self-justifying heroism regarding its aggression—from the genocide of Native Americans in yesteryear to today’s bloody flag waving.
Martin Luther King Jr, at a press conference / World Telegram & Sun photo by Walter Albertin, 8 June 1964. No known copyright restrictions
