Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/78/)
Barack Obama—the keynoter at the Democratic Convention—is a new political talent with enormous potential. Speaking with striking eloquence of the “politics of hope,” he electrified the Democrats convened in Boston in language appealing to Republicans and non-voters as well.
The portents certainly are terrible. Not even the happiest of possible scenarios can be expected to return us to the level of civil liberties we assumed normal before 9/11–not in the foreseeable future, and, if we believe the security services and the politicians of both parties, not ever.
The United States holds a position of military and political dominance unique in world history. The Roman Empire surrounded the Mediterranean Sea but held no sway in the rest of the world. The British Empire was global in reach, but confronted countervailing powers in Europe and in the continents where it had outposts. Neither constraint applies to the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Post-September 11, much remains the same. The recession that officially began in March of 2001 got a bit deeper. Globalization remains the defining trend. As before, the key operating principle that underlies the Washington/Wall Street consensus comes to this: “maximize financial returns and–trust us–everything will work out fine.” We’ve now got $17 trillion in the hands of U.S. money managers, invested with faith in that neoliberal premise.
Given the narrow reportage of the mainstream media and the increasing accessibility, simplicity, and range of online information sources, there is no reason for people who want to keep up on news from Israel and Palestine to remain in corporate-sponsored darkness. Following is a brief survey of some of the best alternative Middle East media websites.
In this time of ideological upheaval, when the old ideologies of left and right, of socialism, liberalism, and conservatism, no longer capture the political imagination the way they once did, new political visions are required. Some have tried to formulate a “Third Way” between social democracy and conservatism. Others, such as Michael Lerner, have proposed a more spiritually-oriented approach to transcend left and right. I would like to present another vision, that of Integral Politics.
The basic medical facts about a full-scale nuclear war have been clear and undisputed for decades. Hundreds of millions would be killed and injured. Massive outbreaks of disease would follow. Food supplies and water would be contaminated and the systems to deliver them destroyed. Drastic and sudden climate changes would wreak havoc on agriculture and human and animal populations. All essential services, including medical and health services, would be rendered useless. Epidemics would rage. Civil defense–the notion that there is somewhere to hide–remains a hoax.
There is a growing sense in American life that politics has become corrupt. Those traditional public spheres in which people could exchange ideas, debate, and shape the conditions that structured their everyday lives increasingly appear to have little relevance or political importance. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values replace social values and people appear more and more willing to re treat into the safe, privatized enclaves of the family, religion, and consumption. The result is not only silence and indifference, but the terrible price paid in what Zygmunt Bauman calls the “hard currency of human suffering.”
When Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, he said that he would spend every day of his presidency thinking about how to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Four years later, the United States and the former Soviet Union possessed more nuclear weapons in their arsenals than before Carter’s arrival in the White House. What was Carter thinking about on those long afternoons in the Oval Office?
By now, you’ve probably heard there’s a “war against boys” in America. The latest heavily-hyped right-wing fusillade against feminism, led by Christina Hoff Sommers’s new book of that title, claims that men are now the second sex and that boys–not girls–are the ones who are in serious trouble, the “victims” of “misguided” feminist efforts to protect and promote girls’ development. They counsel anguished parents to “rescue” or “protect” boys–not from feminists but from a definition of masculinity that is harmful to boys, girls, and other living things.
Education is everywhere in crisis. This is true not just in the failed schools of our inner cities but also in our successful” schools where we are spending huge sums to turn out graduates who lack a moral conscience to match the power of their skills to destroy, to make greedy profits, and to despoil the earth for future generations.
If I sought a conviction for the last thirty years, it would be this – every one has a right to life. Equally, no one has the right to kill – no individual at home or on the street, no doctors in abortion clinics nor any Dr. Jack Kevorkian, no government through war or death row. God alone reserves the right to kill. And then, never does.
The first and most fundamental human right is the right to life. Without it such other rights as freedom of speech and protection against arbitrary arrest are simply irrelevant. In this sense, genocide – the intentional destruction of substantial portions of the racial, national, ethnic and religious components of humanity – is the most heinous of all human rights abuses.
A few weeks after converting to Judaism, I stopped by my neighborhood fish market. I told the man behind the counter that I needed supplies to make gefilte fish for Passover. “You?” he asked. “You’re Jewish? That can’t be, you don’t have the right kind of nose.” By this time I was used to Jews questioning whether I was Jewish, but no non-Jew had done it before. And this comment about noses? I was horrified.
Muslim voices against terrorism have not been silent, but it is the trend, perhaps even the policy of major media, to downplay the voice of reason, the voice of faith, and the voice of principle, in favor of the shouts of the extreme, the wails of the grief-stricken, and the threats of the treacherous. The voices of peace, justice, mercy, and tolerance are not difficult to find among Muslims and Islamic media, who consistently denounce acts of terrorism and reject them as illegitimate and unacceptable Islamic strategies or methods.