Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/davebelden/page/12/)
Well, of course we do. Some new invention that gets us all the energy we want from renewable sources? Isn’t that the holy grail of environmentalists these days, the only way to stave off global warming? Or is it? Today’s headline news is about nuclear fusion again.
One of the main criticisms we at Tikkun have reluctantly had to make of the Obama administration from the start, has been his failure to even “pragmatically” include a genuine range of opinion in his cabinet. He took Geithner and co. from the corporate / financial world, but did not balance those “centrists” (in any European country they would be well to the right of center) with strong progressives. When he did take on a progressive leader — Van Jones — he dropped him like a hot potato as soon as criticisms came up from the Right. One of the disappointments was the choice of Lisa Jackson to head the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Longtime NSP member Jed Downhill sent us this alert from Amnesty International. If you can, please take a few minutes to do this. Amnesty International USA: TAKE ACTION NOW! The self-imposed deadline set by President Obama for his administration to finally close the Guantanamo detention facility came and went to no avail. In fact, the Administration took steps to undermine everything the date was supposed to represent.
I have dived into our last two weeks of getting the print issue of Tikkun to press and have not found time to blog or visit the blogosphere. But this says what I want to say better than I could: an email from my friend Phil who had it from his friend Joanne, so pass it on:
IMPORTANT , PLEASE READ. ( Maybe last chance to save Democracy ) Go to address below to protest Supreme Court Decision. (Received this from an alert friend)
Think well of yourself. Don’t suffer.
We have been very fortunate to have a Chinese student with us for a couple of weeks as a short term intern. Robert Woo comes from Nanjing, a historic city in eastern China, and is studying economics and political science as a sophomore at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. He wanted a warmer place for the winter break and contacted us to volunteer here. He has some initial experience with China’s social activism, and has written on Global Voices, an excellent website for listening in on conversations around the world.
We live in a time of agony. The faces of the devastated people in Haiti come to shock us today. But we learn from UNICEF that
… more than 24,000 children under the age of 5 die every day from preventable causes like pneumonia, malaria, measles and malnutrition. Nearly 200 million youngsters are chronically malnourished, more than 140 million are forced to work, and millions of girls and boys of all ages are subjected to sexual violence.
A rightwinger at a netroots conference has been emphasizing the importance of reason in his work. The videographer unexpectedly asks him what reason feels like. It feels like security, the conservative replies. He had a tough childhood, and embracing reason helped him to get out of the chaos of his life. The videographer is Edwin Rutsch, whose website on progressive values and empathy is an enticing place I hope to explore.
It’s not an act of God. It’s a natural disaster that we know how to mitigate: in a rich country with good building codes few die. But this is a rich world, so why are there poor countries where tens or hundreds of thousands die? Our hearts go out to our brothers and sisters in Haiti. But how much will we be family again once the crisis is off our front pages?
I missed the fact that Mary Daly, the astounding feminist theologian, died a week ago. My local paper reprinted an article from the Boston Globe, but the best piece commemorating her I could find turned out to be published by our friends at Religion Dispatches here, by Susan Henking. The Globe quotes Daly:
“Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin,” she wrote in the opening of “Sin Big,” her New Yorker piece. “The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’
“The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.” — Claude Lévi-Strauss
But are scientists asking themselves enough questions about scientism? We have asked a science graduate (of MIT) who is interning with us, Sarah Ackley, to write a series of posts on this question, not straightforwardly channeling Tikkun’s editorial stance but wrestling with it from her own point of view. I told her I would try to set the scene. I should say up front that I have come to think that this is one of the two or three most critical intellectual issues of our time.