Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/davebelden/page/18/)
The twenty-something son of good friends of mine had some scary symptoms with swine flu last week and recovered. My son at college had a mild go of flu, most likely the H1N1. How worried should we be and where’s the best advice? Swine flu is estimated to have killed 800 people in the US already. This is much less than the 36,000 who are said to die of the flu every winter in the US, so is there little to worry about?
Gay rights in Maine lost. For comment, it’s hard to beat Deborah Haffner, who starts with the good news:
The Good: Voters in Washington State affirmed the rights of same sex couples to “everything but” marriage. In Kalamazoo, voters affirmed a gay rights ordinance. Several openly gay candidates were elected to mayoral positions, several in the south. And the ugly Congressional contest in upstate New York resulted in a pro-choice Democrat being elected.
This is not a historical footnote. This is about next year. A friend of our family who is, I think, 22 is starting a new anarchist collective in Woodstock, NY, the town where he grew up. Chrisso Babcock just wrote us the email below. There is a new wave of young people drawn to basic human skills of growing one’s own food, building one’s own home, and creating face-to-face communities.
Tikkun author Dr. Abby Caplin sent me a link to her new blog, Permission to Heal, a while back but I haven’t managed to take a look until now. I found it a sweet read. She started off by saying:
Welcome! This blog is for people living with chronic illness, who might be up in the middle of the night, or down in the middle of the day. I hope this blog will give you hope, ideas and confidence so you can start to feel better soon!
From the Progressive Change Campaign Committee today:
You may have heard the news. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is threatening to help Republicans block a vote on health care reform if the bill includes a public health insurance option. But when reporters asked Lieberman if he’d be willing to lose his powerful committee chairmanship as a consequence, he said: “Oh, God no.” What’s our answer? Hell yeah!
I’ve been hearing for a couple of years from Karen Kalish about this program that takes Black and Jewish teens around the country to learn about the ways their activist forebears helped each other’s causes. Now teenager Nina Oberman has written us a beautiful piece that tells you what’s happening. Cultural Leadership
by Nina Oberman
In 1963 in Birmingham, teenagers my age walked fearlessly as a torrent of water drove into their bodies, forcing them to the ground. They stared into the menacing eyes of police dogs, at their shredding teeth, their flailing paws, and their tongues slack and thirsty with the blindness of trained attack. 45 years later, I stood on the very same ground that they clung to in determination.
Some interesting posts about the J Street conference are being written on Muzzlewatch. That’s the website of Jewish Voice for Peace, the organization that Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of J Street, just thanked (in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg) for being so far to the left of him it made him look good (see the quote at the end of Peter Marmorek’s review of J Street, just posted here). So here are the excluded poets (about whom we wrote here) holding their own off-conference event:
Speaking at Busboys and Poets in front of huge comic portraits of Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, and Gandhi, the disinvited poets Josh Healey and Kevin Coval, together with moderator Laila Al-Arian, showed why it was J Street’s loss that they did not appear at their originally scheduled panel. The duo clearly embodied the “emergent” Jewish identities that J Street desperately hopes to capture, with poems about their families in Israel, why Kevin quit going to shul, and yes, the Holocaust. …
A nice email here from StopTheChamber.com, relating to The Yes Men’s latest brilliant prank. U.S. Chamber Of Commerce To Sue Itself For Fraud And Self-Parody? Washington, DC: On Thursday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce sent a letter to an internet provider threatening legal action if it did not shut down the Yes Men parody website, because the website falsely portrays the Chamber’s position on global warming. However, in its letter, the Chamber falsely inflated its membership by 1,000 percent and falsely alleged copyright infringement. The Yes Men lawyers strongly opposed this take-down demand and the site remains up at www.chamber-of-commerce.us.
What is our true religion today? What ideology do we allow to proselytize to our children every day, from every side, constantly? Check this out:
This is from a new documentary “Consuming Kids: The Commercialization of Childhood.” It features several members of The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood including the campaign’s co-founder Allen Kanner, who writes a regular column for Tikkun magazine. Check out recent columns of his on corporate advertising in public school classrooms and protecting your child from capitalism.
If you are in Northern California or want an excuse for a visit, consider coming to the Engaging The Other conference in San Francisco (San Mateo to be precise) November 12-15. Michael Lerner and Huston Smith give the keynote speeches on the first evening, Thursday the 12th. Michael needs no introduction here. Huston Smith, the site delightfully tells us, is “internationally renowned as the world’s leading philosopher, scholar, and author on world religions, and has devoted his life to the study of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism, all of which he believes in.” We also learn that his book The World’s Religions has been the most widely-used textbook on its subject for a third of a century — selling over 2,500,000 copies worldwide.