by Christine Barie & Kathie Malley-Morrison
Tag: racism
A plea for sanity and virtue, Part 2
by Stefan Schindler
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.
What brand will you settle for? Maybe not the “Made in America” Variety. Part II
Meeting hall where the armistice talks between the North Korean and Republif of Korea-USA-UN forces were held in 1953. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Author: Clay Gilliland.
by Kathie MM
Negative peace sounds pretty good, right? Signing truces and other agreements to end all the dirty little wars in which our government involves us, and putting a stop to terrorism, gang wars, domestic violence, and the other forms of violence haunting our lives today—wouldn’t that be heavenly? Yes, but wouldn’t it be even better to help peace endure at all levels of society?
Unfortunately, at the international and national levels, the history of peace treaties, ceasefires, nonaggression pacts, and truces is not very encouraging. Treaties and truces have been made and broken repeatedly, at the cost of millions and millions of lives, as greedy governments have used increasingly sophisticated armaments to seize land and resources from resistant others.
At the family level, despite innovative truce bells and family truce intervals, marital cease-and-desist agreements often fail to produce lasting marital peace, leading instead to the negative peace of separation, divorce, and angry children, with all parties smoldering with a sense of unfair treatment.
As for gang violence, truces among violent gangs are relatively commonplace, but like those between nations, also commonly broken. Some evidence indicates that while truces may work for awhile, gang warfare usually resumes in the absence of efforts to address fundamental political and social welfare challenges like marginalization, unemployment, and lack of equal opportunity.
Such concerns are very much the purview of positive peace advocates. Positive peace, by definition, addresses the roots of violence. As conceptualized by Johan Galtung and other peace advocates, positive peace means cooperation for mutual and equal benefit. It means reform of the political and social structures that create and reinforce inequality. It means genuine respect for human rights. It means that women’s voices matter, that people of color don’t need to fear entering their churches, that people of non-Christian faiths can walk fearlessly on our streets. It means that war profiteers are not enabled to put their pursuit of profits ahead of the well-being—indeed the lives—of everyone whom they can “other” for their differences.
Positive peace may sound like the impossible dream, the delusion of cockeyed optimists, but if we don’t strive for it, what kind of future will the world have?
For further reading, see Galtung’s Mini-theory of peace.