Tag: sexism

May The Unseen Be Seen

Posted on by kathiemm
Statue of Truth outside the Supreme Court of Canada in the capital City, Ottawa in the province, Ontario. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: Tomkinsr at English Wikipedia

by Caitlin Johnstone

May what is unseen become seen.

May the hidden dynamics of oligarchy and empire be revealed to all of humanity.

May the depravity of the powerful be exposed before everyone.

May government secrecy end.

May the public become aware of the pervasiveness of mass media propaganda.

May people realize that they’ve been deceived about the world since childhood.

May there be a widespread recognition that things are not as they seem.

May obfuscation and distortion be replaced with truth and clarity.

May the public grow more conscious of the reality of class dynamics.

May the public see money for the made-up game that it is.

May people begin clearly perceiving the horrors of war and economic sanctions, and feel it all.

May awareness sink in of the need for urgent climate action.

May we clearly see the existential need to begin collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem before we destroy it all.

May we all become conscious of racial and sexual dynamics and inequalities.

May we all look squarely at the unacceptable cruelty of factory farming.

May manipulators and abusers everywhere be recognized for what they are.

May abusive dynamics everywhere be clearly seen: in nations, in communities, in families, in relationships.

May unwholesome interpersonal relationships move into clarity or meet a natural end.

May unjust restrictions on consciousness-expanding substances be ended.

May everyone everywhere become conscious of their inner workings.

May our psychological trauma move into the light where it can be healed.

May our unconscious mental and perceptual habits move into consciousness.

May we all become conscious of the illusory nature of self and separation.

May we all become conscious of how experience is really happening.

May we all become conscious of our own true nature.

May we all see clearly what is happening, both inwardly and outwardly.

May we use our clear perception to move efficaciously in this world, and collaborate as one toward health and harmony.

May we build a sane and healthy world together that is based on truth and clear seeing.

Amen.

______________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my new book Poems For Rebels (you can also download a PDF for five bucks) or my old book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge

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.

FROM DARKNESS AT NOON TO THE GLOW OF HOPE, Part 1

Posted on by kathiemm
  • A Female demonstrator offers a flower to military police on guard at the Pentagon during an anti-Vietnam demonstration. Arlington, Virginia, USA. Oct 21, 1967. In the public domain. Author: S.Sgt. Albert R. Simpson.

The Tragic Triumph of the Reagan Counter-Revolution

Against The Spirit of the Sixties, Now Counterbalanced by

the Rekindling of Candles in the Wind

by Stefan Schindler

The 1960s were a time of hope in America and the world. A time of questioning and protest. A renaissance of The Renaissance. The blossoming of a counter-culture committed to peace, freedom, and creative expression.

The Spirit of The Sixties carried over into the 1970s. America and the world saw the continuation and growth of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the anti-nuclear movement, the environmental movement; and, of course, the feminist protest against sexism, perhaps best captured in the bumper sticker: “Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.”

Alas, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, as were the leaders of the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement.

Richard Nixon was elected president twice; then Gerald Ford pardoned him for crimes against humanity.

Jimmy Carter was convinced by his national security adviser to start a covert war against the newly elected social democratic government of Afghanistan, which led to a Russian counter-intervention, which led to America’s creating, funding, and arming of Al Qaeda.

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party saw citizen activism as a “crisis of democracy.” Ronald Reagan applauded American-financed terrorists as “freedom fighters,” and launched the Bush-whacking of FDR’s socialist inspired “New Deal” for the American people.

Bush The First continued Reagan’s attack on America’s middle class and poor, as well as continuing Reagan’s wars abroad, saying, after America shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 civilians, including 66 children: “I will never apologize for America, I don’t care what the facts are.”

Newt Gingrich, in one of history’s greatest ironies, was elected Speaker of the House, successfully championing lies, insults, and divisive sophistry as the road to power during the failed presidency of Bill Clinton, whose Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, said that half a million dead Iraqi children from American bombings and sanctions was “a small price to pay” for freedom, although Iraq was in fact no threat to America’s national security, and Saddam Hussein had long been Ronald Reagan’s favorite dictator.

The Cheney-Bush administration lie-launched America’s Second Vietnam War, this time in the Middle East, convincing Congress to pass the least patriotic legislation in American history, called “The USA Patriot Acts.”

Obama wasted eight years compromising, betraying his base, and succumbing to a cowardice of conscience that made possible the tragic triumph of a new Trumpeting of racism, sexism, militarism, economic apartheid, and fanatical pseudo-patriotism.

Recalling Jeremiah’s warning that “Ye shall reap the whirlwind,” I’m reminded of another bumper sticker: “God is coming; and, boy, is She mad.”

 

Hear-ye, Hear-ye, Read all about it!

Posted on by kathiemm

By Kathie MM

Last Saturday, June 17, 2017, on a miserably wet day, multitudes of women marched in New York City.

Their purpose? Rallying for a United Nations ban on the use, development, and sale of nuclear weapons.

Support for such a ban, like support for efforts to deal with climate change, may be essential to the survival of most of the remaining species on earth, including human beings.

However,  effective banning of the bomb faces enormous obstacles. Foremost is the opposition of all member countries already possessing nuclear weapons—including the United States.

Fortunately, many courageous women—and their male supporters—have faced daunting obstacles in the past and have overcome them.

Step back. Imagine what it must have been like for women in this country when:

  • they could not vote,
  • advocating for a right to vote could mean a term in prison or an insane asylum,
  • divorcing an abusive husband meant losing your children,
  • distributing contraception aids or advertising safe abortions was a criminal offense,
  • higher education was pretty much out of bounds, and
  • while poverty was rampant, nearly every kind of job was closed to women except domestic work and prostitution (which was more lucrative but also a pathway to prison).

Perhaps you have heard the names of some of the women (e.g., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull) who worked, often at great personal cost, to challenge these injustices.

If you want to immerse yourself in the lives of those women and others (e.g., Susan B. Anthony) as they struggled against widespread oppression and persecution (personified by the smug zealot Anthony Comstock), read Marge Piercy’s Sex Wars.

The novel is riveting, with rich and well-researched characterizations of Cady Stanton and Woodhull–courageous, passionate, sometimes conflictual, flawed, admirable human beings–and the nefarious Anthony Comstock (who devoted his life to sending uppity women to jail ), as well as the inimitable fictional immigrant, Freydeh Levin.

Read it for an intimate and engrossing engagement in a culture awash with violent prejudices, run by a cabal of rich and powerful white men able to postpone but not prevent the protest movement for women’s rights.

Read it, be grateful for the progress that’s been made,, and ask what you can do for…

  • Peace,
  • Survival of the earth, and
  • Human rights.