Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/page/110/)
Posts about culture, the arts, the media, book reviews, movies etc.
There’s plenty of room in this struggle for a diversity of movements and a diversity of organizing and actions. Some may choose strict Gandhian nonviolence, others may choose fight-back resistance. But for the Occupy movement, strategic nonviolent direct action is a framework that will allow us to grow in diversity and power.
I know most faculty, much less students, will not have time to read the Student Success Task Force Draft that various people in CA are proposing to “reform” community colleges. My general impression is that, with a few exceptions, the measures proposed will be harmful to the poorest and bar them from college by assuming they aren’t making an effort if they cannot succeed within needlessly early deadlines even if they are learning and growing. It is also assumed that every student has a computer. So to illustrate the way it works, I imagined applying it to another realm: the public library. Here is my report.
Tunisia has just held the first free elections of the Arab Spring, nine months after the fall of former President Zinedine el Abidine Ben Ali. There are also feverish meetings, summits galore in Brussels and elsewhere to save the Euro. Then there are the questions around Col Muammar Gaddafi’s death. I guess news in the US is headed by President Obama’s announcement that the last American soldiers will leave Iraq by the end of this year, drawing to a close an eight-year war that cost the lives of more than 4,400 US troops. Over 10,000 Iraqi troops and police, and well over 100,000 Iraqi civilians.
Our friend Rev. Jim Burklo (Center for Progressive Christianity) just visited the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. His visit is chronicled in this latest musing that I found fascinating and wonderful, especially what happened at the very end… (read on). Musings by Jim Burklo
www.tcpc.blogs.com/musings for current and previous articles
11-8-11
Questioning General Authority
For an exotic cultural and religious experience without leaving the borders of the United States, pay a visit to the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints! With my boss at USC, Varun Soni, Dean of Religious Life, Jerry Campbell, president of the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Lincoln University, Tammi Schneider, dean of religion, and Deborah Freund, president, Claremont Graduate University, I went to Salt Lake City this past Thursday and Friday to meet with top leaders, known as “General Authorities”, of the Mormon church. We were guests of the church, invited by the interfaith representatives of the LDS in southern California.
Buddhist monks in orange robes chant in one corner of the Occupy Oakland encampment. Across the plaza, a reverend in a rainbow stole reads Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Six Principles of Nonviolence.” A block away, candles burn on an unorthodox altar to the death of capitalism.
What’s the connection between the “Occupy” movement and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? What positions are Jewish activists in particular taking on this issue? In this video report, activists from “Occupy Oakland”—a rabbi, a queer Muslim, a Palestinian refugee, a Gaza Freedom March participant, and others—share their stories and perspectives.
When I was reading into a book about Adolf Hitler, entitled The Psychopathic God, when I ran across a meaningful quote from a French Revolution-era author, diplomat and orator named Honore Mirabeau. In the book he wrote about his experience visiting the kingdom of Prussia (A Secret History of the Court of Berlin), Mirabeau wrote:
“Prussia is not a country that has an Army; it is an Army that has a country”. That quote piqued my interest so I did some research into the realities in which Mirabeau found himself. My initial thought was to write column about Prussian militarism and the alarming similarities to our own but instead decided to write about the French Revolution, particularly with the early phases of the current revolution going on around the world in the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring Uprising movements. There are many lessons to be learned.
Anwar Al-Awlaki in Yemen, October 2008. wikimedia commons / Muhammad ud-Deen
On September 30, 2011 a U.S. drone in Yemen assassinated Anwar Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen accused of participation in terrorist activities against the United States. Until there is transparency and oversight, the policy of executive authorization of CIA targeted killings should not be tolerated.
On October 18th I participated in the general assembly meeting in OccupyOakland. On October 22nd I posted a piece about that experience, which I named In Search of Dialogue. Even before writing that piece I have been engaging in my mind with the large question of decision-making in this movement. Since I posted this piece, I have received many comments and have read much that others have written, all of which have taken my thinking forward. I remain deeply humble as I reflect on this movement.
The wall that we think we build between life and death, between good and evil, dissolves into mist on All Hallows Eve. And the shadow of death looms large over us reminding us of our earthly mortality and our complicated selves. We wear the masks that reveal our internal Otherness. We costume ourselves in our fantasies and look our personal monsters in the face. On All Hallows Eve we see our own all too human un-holy-ness.