Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/davebelden/page/29/)
It’s all here, succinctly stated. No wonder this commencement address got a standing ovation. Rabbi Lerner at the Pacific School of Religion. This is why I work here and count myself unbelievably fortunate to do so, despite the fact that we are underfunded, understaffed and as stressed as most other social change activists.
Capitalism is primarily about profit, as we know, and we are in desperate need of a New Bottom Line, which is all about creating a loving and sustainable commonwealth. But let’s first give capitalism its due, and understand why it is so appealing to our spirits as well as our pockets (if we are doing well). If we don’t, we won’t understand its strength. For a minute, think about the past not the future: the ways the rule of the merchant and moneylender was better than what came before. Comparing capitalism’s bottom line with that of traditional societies dominated by religion, it’s clear the pragmatism of the $ opened up new space.
The most inspiring book on personal change I have read in years is Sunny Schwartz’s Dreams from the Monster Factory: A Tale of Prison, Redemption and One Woman’s Fight to Restore Justice to All (co-author, David Boodell): because it is about the hardest most violent prisoners figuring out how to change their lives. We will write about it in Tikkun but I was thrilled this week that the New York Review of Books has a long and enthusiastic review. About one child abuser in the program who was afraid of what he would do when released, the reviewer writes:
She [Schwartz] knew that some men, perhaps including this one, were beyond rehabilitation, but she also knew instinctively–and correctly, it turned out–that most could change if they were given the chance, but they would need powerful emotional assistance to do it. What this assistance would consist of was not obvious at first. But she worked out how to do it so well that,
In 2004, the psychiatrists James Gilligan and Bandy Lee of New York University and Yale, respectively, evaluated RSVP [Schwartz’s program] and found that it sharply reduced recidivism rates.
Here’s a story to warm your soul on a Friday morning. A girl and her family got the ACLU’s help to combat the harassment that staff as well as students were subjecting her to. “All I ever wanted was to be able to go to school and just be myself. But I couldn’t do that when the people I was supposed to be learning from were judging me and telling me something was wrong with me. How was I supposed to learn when I was constantly scared?”
I’m doubly lucky this week that my friend Be Scofield, who interned a while back at Tikkun, is now at Starr King seminary and invited me to hear Rev. Wright on Tuesday and Chris Hedges today. I hadn’t realized that the former war correspondent and current hard-hitting opponent of both the Religious Right (or the heretical Christian Fascists as he would prefer that we think of them) and the New Atheists, one of the stars of the spiritual progressive world, had himself gone to seminary (Harvard Divinity School). His talk to the seminarians today was alarming, about:
the lack of literacy and critical thought in America
the primacy of the image (TV and advertising) that works its manipulative emotional way with us however critical we are of it
the nature of corporate “reverse totalitarianism” (in which ideology is subservient to profitmaking, unlike other totalitarian or theocratic states)
and the likelihood that this round of stimulus will create a financial bubble that will burst and leave us in much deeper trouble, prey to pseudo-Christian fascist demagogues who will have a field day due to the bankruptcy of liberalism. Much of this sounded convincing to me, and he had wise words about what to do about it. Our question should never be “How can we elect good people?”
I was privileged Tuesday to attend a seminar at Starr King, the Unitarian Universalist seminary, addressed by Rev. Wright, Obama’s famous or, in the eyes of the media, notorious pastor. Wright entertained the seminarians with tales of how he took a church in Chicago that was dying because it was a white church in blackface that had no appeal to the nearby projects, and turned it into a black church that brought people in by the thousands. Much of his talk centered on music: how the German Lieder and Negro Spirituals (which he dissed as black music made fit for European audiences so it was no longer black music) were replaced with gospel, blues, and jazz, which his first choir director dismissed as folk music. Clearly he is a churchman of great accomplishment and courage, and one who is more than willing to admit faults. He described his early homophobia frankly, and the pay off for people’s lives once he came around and congregants came out of the closet.
Literally. Over 5,000 Muslims in the British Army died liberating Italy in WWII. I learned of a research article on this from a post by Musab Bora on altmuslim today. There has been so much about “Islamofascism” since 9/11, and much has been made of isolated incidents of Muslim support for Hitler, but how much have you read about Muslims who died fighting the Nazis and Italian Fascists? Imam ZaidShakir has an excellent article rebutting the “Islamofascist” meme in Tikkun this issue.
I saw Stardust again last night, and if you want a stunningly good fantasy movie and you missed it the first time, see it. I read my first Neil Gaiman novels last year (American Gods and Neverwhere) and we saw and loved Coraline recently: one of the year’s must see movies. I hadn’t realized Stardust was made from a Gaiman novel, and when that came up in the credits this time and I now recognized his name, it explained to me how a movie that has so many trappings of fantasy froth could actually be a decent, intelligent, totally enjoyable movie. It’s Gaiman, I said to my son, that explains it, and he agreed. Stardust is a light and humorous as Coraline is dark, but both have heart and soul.
Maureen Dowd’s excuse about her plagiarism in yesterday’s op-ed was very weak–not the kind of thing she would accept from anyone else. It’s only because she is so ungenerous in print that readers like me are prone to a little schadenfreude on seeing her plead for a generous interpretation for herself. She gave Biden short shrift for plagiarism back in the day. More here. I read Dowd because she does often play the role of the child who says the emperor has no clothes, and she is often acute, and because she is an equal opportunity eviscerator: I don’t only want to hear the people I dislike trashed, it’s too easy to live in a bubble on the internet, hearing only opinions you agree with.
Is Pelosi privately wishing that she had not so pusillanimous on torture back in 2002-3, now that her silence then has lost her the moral high ground now? Or does she still believe that her caution then helped her get to her majority now? The public still seems mostly pro torture, we learn again today. I find politics a mystery. I have little idea how leadership can turn public opinion around.