Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/galleryeditor/page/30/)
Now, fourteen years later, it is 2016, and you (as that former Iraqi child) have grown into young manhood while watching Americans kill and maim literally hundreds of thousands of your civilian countrymen—perhaps one or both of your parents, perhaps one or more of your sisters and brothers, perhaps members of your extended family tribe, almost certainly friends and other villagers you had known.
Several months still separate us from the November elections but the atmosphere in the country is getting increasingly tense. Americans are angry and they direct their anger against the political establishment. They blame both the Democratic and Republican elites for the continued malaise and political paralysis. While the growing number of American voters believes that the country needs new ideas, there is little new in what either the Democratic or the Republican establishment candidates propose. Neither Ted Cruz nor John Kasich ventures in their imagination far beyond the defunct policies of cutting taxes. The agenda of Hillary Clinton is essentially a rehashed and scaled-down version of the New Deal. With their clear anti-establishment message Sanders and Trump, as different as they may be, are the two candidates who stand to benefit most from the current discontent.
I don’t know that my challenge was every Brandesian’s challenge. We are a contingent of students from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. The Jewish members of our group represent a wide spectrum stretching from secular to modern orthodox. Every one of us has individual feelings about Israel and a unique perspective on the conflict. But a wonderfully surprising by-product of this partnership is that the Brandeis students developed friendships and understandings about our own commonalities and differences which further strengthened bonds within the group, enriching the entire group’s experiences and creating a foundation for continuing the work that had just begun.
Exactly 3 weeks ago at on March 4, I arrived in Honduras. It was 36 hours after Berta Cáceres had been brutally murdered while sleeping in her bed in the middle of the night. One arm and one leg were broken as she fought her attackers, then she was shot in the forehead, death squad style. It was ironic that they had broken her arm, as she was referred to by the BBC as “the woman who twisted the arm of the World Bank and China,” referring to the year-long protest she organized of the indigenous Lenca community of Rio Blanco against the building of one of the largest hydroelectric dams (without the community’s prior consent) on the Rio Gualcarque, causing China and the World bank to pull financing of the illegal dam construction. This dam would have been used to divert water to gold mining projects and to be part of a regional energy network to take transfer the power of the river to richer countries further north.
Bernie Sanders is the same person he’s been since he entered public life. You know what you are getting and though my political philosophies differ from his, he has demonstrated an openness and honest willingness to work with both sides of the aisle. Among the remaining candidates for President, I believe only Sanders (and possibly Kasich) possess the ability to bring our fractured nation back together.
It may be too late for the Republican Party at this point, so I will reach-out to my liberal friends and encourage them to support Sanders for the Democrat nominee.
The principle of equality has become the template of philosophical debate since the early 1970’s. The debate has largely taken place at Harvard, but with an intriguing Zionist influence. It began with John Rawls’ paradigm-shattering book, A Theory of Justice (1971). Almost two centuries after the writing of Immanuel Kant, the same humanistic theory burst on scene but with an economic twist, namely the non-ethical concept of incentive or self-interested action. As is often the case, the fusion of independent physical or mental elements can produce a sudden spurt of energy – in this case, of Kantian moral thought merged with an economic version of self-interest.
In his keynote address to the March 18 “Israel’s Influence: Good or Bad for America?” conference, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described where he would take, and what he would say to, a U.S. congressional delegation to Israel.
Watch any television program, listen to the radio, go to the movies, listen with some detachment to many conversations going on around you: Vulgarity is not the sole purview of the Republican party. It’s become our national culture. If I had fallen asleep when television had just begun and were waking up today, I’m not sure I could withstand the shock, just thinking of the way people speak to each other today, never mind the ubiquity of the violence
Alzheimer’s disease is a problem expected to grow in the years ahead. Now we are neither Democrats nor Republicans. Now we are The Alzheimer’s Party. Just as this disease is equal opportunity: Ds or Rs; rich or poor; male or female, African-American, Latino or white — we all are at risk.
Slightly more than a decade ago, Philip Roth warned how fascism would come to America – legally, of course, since we’re a nation of laws, and attached to a hero, a legend, a star: the aviator ex machina himself, Charles Lindbergh, since Roth was writing about the U.S. in the late 30’s and early 40s, the years when Lucky Lindy’s popularity peaked. Roth cautioned about all this in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America — an almost plausible schematic of a Nazi takeover of the United States. We foolishly paid no heed to Roth’s prophecy because we’re supposedly too smart, too wedded to democracy, too cynical of salesmen pitching quickie panaceas, and too… well, too gosh darn decent to let that Nazi stuff sully our certainty that we’re a beacon for the world, a gleaming city on a hill. No way, we crowed, thumping our chests in pride: it can’t happen here. But if a “beautiful wall” is built along the Rio Grande, and Muslims are barred from coming here, and white supremacists set up camp in the Oval Office, and libel laws make it criminal to criticize the government, and female dignity is dialed back decades, and journalists and minorities are roughed up daily, then it can happen here.