Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/media-tools/page/8/)
Of the countless intersubjective graces unfolding in Zuccotti Park and around the Occupy world, the “human microphone” is recapturing something as old as human learning. This is something sacred: a repurposing of voice, ear, and content that may serve no less than the remembering of a more coherent human consciousness.
Today was another triumph for Occupy Wall Street. It was so crowded with supporters and media at 5:00 a.m. and it was also immaculate so the excuse that it must be vacated for cleaning failed. The cops that began with batons raised and ready could not proceed. This is a movement that captures America’s reality. Occupy Wall Street has no stated platform because particular measures passed within a corrupt system will be part of that corruption.
It wasn’t until people saw a police officer macing a defenseless woman locked in a cage that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began to garner attention from the establishment media. When widespread shock at such an egregious act made ignoring OWS impossible, the establishment media tried denigrating it; painting the participants with broad brushstrokes from the pallet of tired, “Woodstock”-era clichés. After union workers and airline pilots began showing up in front of the Cathedrals of Wall Street Criminality, it got harder to disparage OWS through lazy references to bongos and granola. The loose, leaderless organizational structure, as well as the lack of clearly-defined demands, earned OWS sneers from the establishment media. NPR summarized their early disinterest in OWS by stating “the recent protests on Wall Street did not involve large numbers of people, prominent people, a great disruption or an especially clear objective.”
This is a guest post by Jason A. Kerr, a doctoral candidate in English at Boston College. He is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On 7 October, Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, was speaking to reporters outside the Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC, where he had just introduced Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry. Taking aim at Perry’s rival for the nomination, Mitt Romney, Jeffress said that Romney, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “is not a Christian.” Jeffress went on to say, “This idea that Mormonism is a theological cult is not news….
The Israeli soldiers fixated on one of the costumes. They entered the scene, stopped the performance, and demanded the actor remove his shirt. After a discussion, they allowed the play to continue. But the actor had to go on without half his costume. The play was set in the same place it was performed — in front of a security checkpoint in Israel.
For many Jews, the Torah seems inaccessible. It is distant historically, culturally and linguistically. The Biblical figures seem far removed and unapproachable and the scenes and vignettes do not seem applicable to everyday life. Yet this sense of distance from the Torah may be as much a function of religious education as it is of the ancient nature of the text itself. Hebrew schools face structural problems in engaging students, since many classes are convened on evenings and weekends, when already over-programmed young people are either tired or less receptive to further learning opportunities.
When I saw Eliaichi Kimaro’s moving and complex documentary A Lot Like You at the Seattle International Film Festival in June 2011, one of my first responses to this film was to recognize it as a model for a personal and family accountability process. Having just finished reviewing The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities for Bitch magazine, I was interested in seeing more concrete examples of community accountability, which the authors define as “any strategy to address violence, abuse or harm that creates safety, justice, reparations, and healing without relying on police, prisons, childhood protective services, or any other state systems.” A Lot Like You brings to life the complicated, messy, beautiful, and liberatory process of addressing harm and seeking healing within a family context. I sought out Eliaichi, a Seattle filmmaker and activist, for an interview and was excited to learn that she also sees her film as capturing the beginning of a family accountability process. The film was originally titled Worlds Apart, and its change to A Lot Like You reflects the journey that Eliaichi embarked upon while creating this documentary about her relationship to her father’s side of the family – the Chagga tribe in Tanzania, who live on the slopes of Mt.
During a decade spent in the Beltway, I was periodically flabbergasted by the striking provincialism of ostensibly highly educated, well traveled and professionally accomplished individuals when discussions turned to the Muslim world. Frankly, in some people, when question of Muslims come up certain parts of the human brain seem to simply cease to operate, with consistency, common sense and rigor temporarily going out the window as a result. Thus, a variety of anachronistic attitudes and essentializing stereotypes return from the dustbin of intellectual history, until a modicum of socio-historical rigor (or at least caution) is restored when attention shifts to some more “normal” and less exoticized community. Peter Hart points out an especially egregious recent example of this phenomenon on the invaluable FAIR Blog:
The end of a Wall Street Journal article (7/14/11) on a new report on Afghan deaths highlights the peculiarity of their culture:
Of civilian casualties, 2 percent were caused by night raids, slightly down from last year, with 30 fatalities, the report says. Night raids have been a contentious issue between Afghan President Hamid Karzai and U.S. military officers and civilian leaders. The raids are sensitive in Afghanistan, because foreign soldiers burst into civilian homes, where strangers are unwelcome in the country’s conservative Islamic traditions.
Across California, 6,600 prisoners have participated in the hunger strike begun on July 1 at Pelican Bay State prison’s security housing unit or solitary confinement. On July 1st, 43 prisoners inside California Pelican Bay State Prison’s security housing unit (or SHU, a fancy name to get those of us not in prison to think it is something other than solitary confinement and all that entails) began a hunger strike against torture and for self-determination and liberation. Solidarity with prisoners who are organizing themselves for justice is just a click away. Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity, a San Francisco Bay Area coalition of grassroots organizations “committed to amplyifing the voices of and supporting the prisoners,” has a blog and I suggest you check out like I did by clicking here. It’s day two and at the same time as these 43 prisoners refuse food in participate in this hunger strike at Pelican Bay, 2.3 million people are in similar conditions, marginalized in solitary confinement and isolating conditions within an already hidden and dehumanizing system.
It’s always easier for folks to prove themselves right than to change their minds. Always easier to make a mess than to clean one up. That’s the pessimists’ advantage historically. Nowhere in modern history has this been as true as in the Holy Land. On May 4, I outlined a plausible battle plan for peace focused on this September when the 66th UN General Assembly will vote to recognize Palestine.