Empathy
Keen on Occupy Wall Street
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The people occupying Wall Street, Washington DC and other cities are our keeners. They are expressing what we won’t or can’t express.
Culture
An Alternative to Demands: Notes from OccupyOakland, October 18th
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The OccupyOakland I visited on October 15th was not a protest. You could say that I knew it, because I have read about it before I was there. I still couldn’t understand it fully until I saw what it meant. I suspect the same is true elsewhere, though I will not presume to know. A protest, in some fundamental way, engages with the existing power structures.
ESRA
The Message and Strategy That Is Needed by Occupy Wall Street
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This past weekend, Occupy Wall Street demonstrations were held in over 951 cities in 82 countries as people around the globe joined in an international day of solidarity against the greed and corruption of the 1%.
The media, trying to discredit all the demonstrators, say we don’t know what we are for, only what we are against. So I believe there is much to be gained were we to embrace the following 20 second sound bite for “what we are for.”
Empathy
Mic Check: How the Occupy Movement Creates Empathy Through Communication
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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.
Culture
Beyond the Limits of Empathy
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Can empathy serve as a reliable guide to action? David Brooks, in his recent article “The Limits of Empathy,” suggests that empathy is no guarantee that caring action will take place. Participants in Milgram’s famous 1950s experiments willingly inflicted what they thought were near-lethal electric shocks despite suffering tremendously. Nazi executors early in the war wept while killing Jews. And yet those strong feelings didn’t stop them.
Culture
Occupy Sukkot – An Expansion of Occupy Wall Street Where Jewish Activism and Civil Disobedience Converge
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After more than 1,000 Jews gathered for Kol Nidre on Wall Street, what will be the next initiative? Occupy Sukkot.
General News
Bringing the Salt March to Wall Street
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In a few days the Occupy Wall Street movement arrives in my town, Oakland, and I am thinking a lot about what I want to do. As I reflect on what’s been happening in the last number of weeks, I feel quite uplifted and so, so relieved. For months I was watching with growing discomfort the absence of action in the US while nonviolent resistance was spreading like wildfire to more and more countries. Now, finally, the movement is spreading in this country which I have made my home since 1983. City after city now has its own occupy location, with a similar spirit in many of them.
Non-Violent Communication (NVC)
Musings on Choice and Children
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When I was twelve my family moved from Israel to Mexico for two years. This decision happened immediately following the first year in my young life, and one of the only times in my life overall, that I had a sense of belonging and acceptance in a group of peers. The decision was made by my parents without consulting with any of us: my seventeen-year-old sister, myself, or my younger sister who was then five. More than that: it was made against my vociferous opposition, which was so strong that I was semi-seriously contemplating jumping off the ship and swimming back to Israel. Not only did my parents have the legal right to take me against my will.
Culture
Prof. Mearsheimer endorses anti-Jewish book
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When Profs. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt co-authored their book on the “Israel Lobby,” they drew back from their original formulation that it had manipulated the US to invade Iraq on behalf of Israel. Their more carefully worded thesis was that it was a “necessary but insufficient cause” for the Iraq war. Still, many (including myself) took this amiss because:
1. It discounts a fuller explanation for the US warring on Iraq, e.g.: W. Bush’s animus at Saddam Hussein for attempting to assassinate his family while visiting Kuwait after the first Iraq war, the importance of oil (Noam Chomsky’s view), frustration that Saddam Hussein continued to oppress his people and to bluster against the US — even though he could have been easily overthrown in 1991, and finally the influence of neocons and some liberals who saw Saddam’s rule as both a threat to peace in the region and the source of an ongoing human rights crisis.
Non-Violent Communication (NVC)
Occupy Wall Street Comes to San Francisco – How You Can Help
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[youtube: video=”4SUdPe-X7b4″]
On Thursday, Sept. 29th over 1,000 people marched in San Francisco to voice their frustration against the corrupt financial institutions that have been harming the lives of millions. It was the latest effort in what is a quickly spreading movement. While New York is the largest, there are Occupy movements cropping up in every city – Chicago, Miami, Seattle, LA, Boston and Reno just to name a few. For those who missed it, the SF march was energetic and filled with passionate, yet frustrated voices.