Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/50/)
Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports, and fireworks, while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast.
The Supreme Court’s decision on voting rights reminds us that racism against Blacks remains far more deeply implanted in America’s economic and political institutions, and in the consciousness of many Americans, than the horrendous homophobia that may now be somewhat receding. Yet it is also a testimony to those in the gay world who refused to be “realistic” when told that gay marriage was unthinkable. We need that same kind of unrealistic thinking to revive the necessary struggle against American racism.
That the corporate-driven “medium” overcomes almost any conceivable “message” is one of the clearest lessons of the election of 2012. A review of Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney
We at Tikkun are proud to announce that Rabbi Arthur Waskow and his wife and partner Rabbi Phyllis Berman will be co-leading High Holiday services with Rabbi Michael Lerner on Yom KippurSept. 13-14. You don’t have to be Jewish and you don’t have to live in the Bay Area to decide to do the High Holidays with Rabbi Lerner and Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls which will be holding the services at Zaytuna Institute and the Pacific School of Religion one block north of the U.C. campus (people in the past have come from as far away as Israel, Australia, Russia, South Africa, Canada and South America). Registration information will be on line at www.beyttikkun by the end of June, but it’s not too early to mark your calendar now and decide to come: Rosh HaShanah (1st eve: Sept. 4, 1st and 2nd day: Sept 5& 6) plus Yom Kippur Sept.
More than a month has passed since two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, but the fear and anti-Muslim fervor generated by the attack continues to ripple through the United States.
Michael Eigen isn’t only one of the leading and most important psychoanalysts in the world, but also a poet of strong-expression who plays the piano, wanders in the forest, and seeks holiness through Chasidic studies and Kabbalah. I had a conversation with Eigen, the Jewish kid who became one of Wilfred Bion’s greatest students (“thanks to him I decided to get married”), on the occasion of the publishing of his book Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis. At that time he told me:
When I was a little boy I remember seeing a tree. Half of it was withered and dead and the other half was blooming. Then I realized that one could be dead and very much alive, concurrently. We are not monolithic, and can experience vitality and life on certain levels and on others total deadness.
People living in contaminated areas collect military waste to melt into household goods: they’re called war spoons, war chopsticks, war knives, etc. Houses are built on stilts made of bomb cases, which don’t rot in the monsoon mud. Householders make bomb gardens, using the largest bomb cases as raised planters. And, of course, bombs also explode and kill or injure more people every year.
I belong to a group called the Evangelical Immigration Table, a loosely connected group of evangelical Christians who are advocating an approach to immigration that is rooted in Judeo-Christian principles like respect for the dignity of life, the rule of law, and the importance of family.
The entrenchment of Border Patrol agents, military contractors, surveillance technology, and fencing on our southern border has not made us safer. The last decade of border spending has left the border more deadly and more corrupt than ever before. We hope that Comprehensive Immigration Reform will bring relief to many families who will no longer fear that going out to buy milk could end in a deportation. We look forward to a day when fewer people have to trek through the desert to reunite with their families.
The author of this article ignores the environmental threat to the survival of the human race that global capitalism has become, but his thinking about its destructive impact on the ethical climate is significant (and in part it is the decline of the ethical climate which has contributed to the sad passivity manifested even by that majority of Americans who understand the urgency facing us and yet who feel unable to act in concert with others to challenge the upcoming disasters). –Rabbi Michael Lerner
Capitalism is killing our morals, our future
Commentary: In a Market Society, everything is for sale
Paul B. Farrell
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/capitalism-is-killing-our-morals-our-future-2013-04-27
April 29, 2013
(reprinted from Market Watch)
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, capitalism is working … for the Forbes 1,000 Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,426 recently. Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, while the income of American workers stagnated.
A key component of the “Gang of Eight” immigration proposal would entail a strengthening of the very system of immigration control and exclusion that has given rise to the current “crisis” and underlies the push for change. It will also permanently bar many now living and working in the United States—regardless of their ties to the country—from ever having the possibility of regularizing their status, while making their lives, and those of future unauthorized immigrants, more difficult.
With the gay pride and rights marches of yesteryear, the responses from mainstream society to homosexual people marching down city boulevards or the National Mall was either the sound of vitriolic hatred, or a tepid tolerance. Now, a slight majority of Americans favor full marriage equality for same-sex couples, and there is an outside chance that the Supreme Court may declare state bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional, or at least end same-sex marriage discrimination in California.
What do you do with your parents’ possessions? With the collections of a lifetime? What do you do with the books?