Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/36/)
Racism is the demeaning of an entire group of people and refusal to see them as fully human in the way we see ourselves and those we deem to be “like” us. When we fail to see the humanity of the “other,” we ascribe to them ugly characteristics that somehow justify treating them with less honor and less generosity than we would others who are part of the groups we do see as fundamentally like us.
With stations like KNSJ realizing the potential of grassroots radio and hundreds more stations set to go on the air very soon, many advocates see the 21st century as a new era for participatory media.
Jon Swan’s poem about drones is a haunting vision. “The drone hovers under the iron-gray dome of heaven . . .”
Educated Hope and the Promise of Democracy[i]
by
Henry A. Giroux
Commencement Speech at Chapman University
May 24, 2015—Final Revision
I am very moved and humbled to accept an honorary degree on this important occasion today, and to be with all of you in sharing this wonderful achievement of graduating from Chapman University. As a father who struggled to put three boys through higher education, I think it is appropriate that I should begin by first acknowledging those parents and family members, whose support throughout the years helped to make it possible for you to achieve this tremendous milestone in your life. And as Stephen Colbert said to a graduating class at Northwestern University, Aif you don’t thank them now, you’ll have plenty of time to thank them tomorrow when you move back in with them.@ Just kidding, I hope.
I am especially honored to be in the presence of so many of you who have chosen education as a field of study. I can think of no generation for whom education is more important than it is for yours at this particular time in history.
Journal for Social Action in Counseling and Psychology, 2015 ( in press)
Psychology and the Prevention of War Trauma: An Article Rejected by American Psychologist
by
Marc Pilisuk and Ines-Lena Mahr [i]
Author Note
Marc Pilisuk, emeritus professor, University of California; faculty, Saybrook University. He is a past President of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence. His awards for teaching, research, and action in peace, justice and transformative change include the 2011 Howard Zinn award from the Peace and Justice Studies Association.
Ines-Lena Mahr completed her undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts and Science at the University College Maastricht in the Netherlands, focusing on Psychology and International Relations. In Fall, 2013, she will start the Masters programme in Social and Cultural Psychology at the London School of Economics.
The conception of Yahweh as placeless reflects the Jewish sense of identity as essentially homeless. But the homelessness of the Jewish deity is in no way a defect — the Jewish concept of the divine represents a radical intellectual advance.
APRIL 27, 2015
Rethinking Michael Eric Dyson’s Attack on Cornel West
The Perils of Being a Public Intellectual
by HENRY A. GIROUX
Michael Eric Dyson has launched in the New Republic a bitter attack on Cornel West.[1] At the heart of Dyson’s critique is a discourse that engages in character assassination but not before he makes clear what is really at stake in his attack. Dyson resents West’s critique of Obama’s domestic and foreign policies. But rather than judiciously and analytically weigh such criticisms, hardly confined to West, he positions him as a spurned lover, angry and bitter because among other things, he did not get a ticket to Obama’s 2008 inauguration. Dyson expands his critique by claiming that West is not a scholar, who has lived up to the standards of decent scholarship, bolstering his case by quoting among others, Larry Summers, the irrepressible apostle of neoliberalism and unbridled finance capital. It never occurs to Dyson that Summers’ critique of West may be more political than anything else.
As long as corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the investments of their stockholders, they have no choice but to make profits their “bottom line.” But we are promoting a New Bottom Line, so that every corporation, government policy, our legal system, health care system, educational system, and every other major system is judged efficient, rational and productive to the extent that they maximize love and caring, environmental sustainability and responsibility, ethical behavior and generosity, and our capacities to respond to the Earth with radical amazement, of which we are an important part.
A Real Solution to Environmental Sustainability
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
Only a sweeping Constitutional amendment can save us from a global environmental disaster beyond our imagination. It’s time to sweep aside all the illusions:
* The illusion that the national environmental organizations have a secret plan to save the environment but just haven’t told us yet. * The illusion that local acts of environmental sanity in a few dozen urban areas will make a dent on the global degradation of the life-support-system of the planet. * The illusion that “new technologies” will solve the problem. * The illusion that individual acts of recycling and “conscious consumerism” will change what is being produced.
We, the young, pretty ones, could easily find or fake the generosity to jolly those luckless oldsters along. We could cheerfully shake their hands (only a little appalled by their soft grips, papery skin, delicate bones, faintly mildewed smell). We could chat with them, ask how they were getting on., and we found ways to look interested in their answers. We listened, even if the answers bored us. Silently, however, we relegated the oldsters’ thinking and experience to the Irrelevant pile.
Will the political world finally rally, acting fast and decisively enough to save a tolerable planet for our descendants? This is an unprecedented moral challenge.
Palestinians trapped dying in Yarmouk, Syria – a test for the left
If, as progressives, we truly care about injustices done to Palestinians, if our goal as leftists goes beyond expressing fury toward Israel, we must raise our voices every bit as forcefully, right now, to try to help the people of Yarmouk. By Bradley Burston
It was once the largest Palestinian community in Syria. Situated barely a few miles from President Bashar Assad’s palace in Damascus, the two square kilometers of the Yarmouk district were a de facto refugee camp, home to well over 100,000 people. But that was before the Syrian civil war made the camp into a battleground four years ago, before the Assad government besieged the camp for more than two years, and, most recently, before ISIS invaded it as a strategic prize, Syrian aircraft barrel-bombed it, and the 18,000 Palestinians left there have been trapped, slowly starving, vulnerable to disease, deadly crossfire, and the horrifying prospects of ISIS rule. Read Brad Burston’s insightful column in Ha’aretz at: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/1.650850
The environmental movement is too fragmented. It’s time to integrate our struggles and recognize the spiritual dimension of our political work.
Movement work can leave us angry, exhausted, and traumatized. Here are seven mindfulness practices that can help to sustain our activist work.
The push for $15 per hour at SeaTac was about more than just paychecks—it was an interfaith, values-based struggle against power inequality.