by Keith McHenry The City of Orlando has made over 20 arrests for sharing meals with the hungry at Lake Eola Park. The city limits the group to sharing twice a year per park. Food Not Bombs has been sharing free vegetarian meals and literature in public for over 30 years. While many believe that hunger and poverty is the result of personal failing and the solution can be found by getting closer to God, Food Not Bombs thought the solution could be found in changing public policy, economics and society. With fifty cents of every federal tax dollar going towards the military, no one in the world’s wealthiest country should have to stand in line to eat at a soup kitchen.
The corporate machine’s drive for profit has resulted in a race to the bottom. The bottom line is profit at the expense of people, social justice, and the environment. In the United States, wages are stagnant, unemployment and homelessness grow, and more families are finding themselves unable to afford food. Food Not Bombs is doing something about hunger. A worldwide all-volunteer organization that has existed for 30 years, Food Not Bombs feeds people vegetarian meals and protests war and poverty.
One of the common misconceptions about the practice of Nonviolent Communication is that it’s about being “nice.” It’s probably a similar misconception to that of thinking of nonviolence as passivity. I believe both misconceptions derive from our habit of either/or thinking. Most of us don’t have models for a path that’s neither aggressive nor passive. Within this either/or thinking, if the only two models are imposing on others or giving up on our own needs, many of us will interpret nonviolence as the latter.
Despite their emphasis on reason, evidence and a desire to see through false truth claims, many atheists hold surprisingly ill-informed beliefs about religion. Many of these myths go unquestioned simply because they serve the purpose of discrediting religion at large. They allow for the construction of a straw man i.e. a distorted and simplistic representation of religion which can be easily attacked, summarily dismissed and ridiculed. Others who genuinely believe these false claims merely have a limited understanding of the ideas involved and have never thoroughly examined them. But, myths are myths and they should be acknowledged for what they are.
by Alicia Ostriker
GHAZAL: AMERICA
My grandfather’s pipe tobacco fragrance, moss-green cardigan, his Yiddish lullaby
when I woke crying: three of my earliest memories in America
Arriving on time for the first big war, remaining for the second, sad grandpa
who walked across Europe to get to America
When the babies starved, when the village burned, when you were flogged
Log out, ship out, there was a dream, the green breast of America
My grandfather said no President including Roosevelt would save the Jews in Europe
He drew out an ample handkerchief and wiped away the weeping of America
One thing that makes me happy about my country
is that Allen Ginsberg could fearlessly write the comic poem “America”
Route sixty-six entices me westward ho toward dreaming California
I adore superhighways but money is the route of all evil in America
Curse the mines curse the sweatshops curse the factory curse the boss
Let devils in hell torment the makers of bombs over Baghdad in America
When I video your rivers your painterly meadows your public sculpture Rockies,
When I walk in your filthy cities I love you so much I bless you so much America
People people look there: grandpa please look: Liberty the Shekhina herself
Welcoming you like a queen, like a mother, to America
Take the fluteplayer from the mesa, take the raven from his tree
Now that the buffalo is gone from America
White man, the blacks are snarling, the yellows swarming, the umber terrorists
Are tunneling through and breathing your air of fear in America
If you will it, it is no dream, somebody admonished my grandfather
He surmised they were speaking of freedom in America
AT THE BANQUET
For Dunya Mikhail
I am making a banquet of death
I am swallowing the six million plus
gypsies homosexuals the feeble
the sixty million and more
as Toni Morrison declares in the dedication
to Beloved yes there are things we eat to live
and things we eat for entertainment
all the wounds the pollutions in my country
my good body takes them in plus
Vilna Dresden Nanjing Nagasaki
Palestine Memphis Baghdad the Congo
The former Yugoslavia
And the other Americas the gold and silver vanished
La Virgen weeping Los Indios bleeding
And here I am sucking that blood
in the land of the free
in the land of the free and the drugged
in the nation of money
all of us shoppers all of us holy innocents
all of us readers and writers of righteous tweets
all of us vampires and voters, all of us sports fans
sucking it up brushing our capital teeth
“[Fred Rogers] is the only human being on TV to whom you would entrust the future of the world.” –Gloria Steinem
When it came to understanding and communicating with people of all ages, Fred Rogers was a genius. Fred Rogers knew what really made people tick. First, he was a life-long student of human development. Indeed, he studied under some of the best child psychologists and psychiatrists of his time.
I have a close friend I walk with every week. We have been doing it regularly for about three years now. The walking and the friendship are mutually reinforcing, and as far as I am concerned, this practice could continue indefinitely. So I was shocked when, one evening a few months ago, I got an email letting me know that my friend would be taking a break from walking with me, at least for a while, starting the next day. My friend, let’s call her Nancy, asked to know my response to her message, affirmed her sense of connection with me, explained what the reason for the break was (she needed her energy for some major projects in her life, which made total sense to me), and proposed other ways of staying in touch.
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.
This second installment of my Tikkun Daily series on “Spoken Word, Video, and Performance Art to Change the World” features multidisciplinary artist Norman Nawrocki of Montreal, Quebec. Nawrocki’s art is about community, it’s about activism, and he doesn’t shy away from taking a critical look at some of today’s most politically charged issues. Like all of the artists featured here, Nawrocki sees art as a means for social change, and he lives this not only in his role as artist, but as an instructor as well, helping to form the next generation of artist/provocateurs. Incorporating many genres into his work Nawrocki is an author, veteran spoken word artist, violinist, actor, educator, and sex advocate with an international reputation. He has several books of short fiction and poetry (in English, French & Italian), over 50 music albums (solo & with his different bands), and has written several theater musicals and cabarets.
Some time ago I wrote about submission and rebellion, the two poles that we have inherited as traditional responses to another’s power. Today I want to return to this topic from a different angle, which is whether and how we can transform power dynamics, so that the statement that “power corrupts” no longer appears so completely like a truism. Another way of asking this question: what does it take for any of us to become “incorruptible,” meaning being so strong in our inner practice that we can withstand the allure of power? I want to believe that we can operate in a way that diminishes and eventually makes obsolete the responses of submission and rebellion. I am a relatively small fish in the large order of things.