Health
How to Move the Country to the Left
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So, on this day after Election Day 2010, let us dream dreams and see vision because where there is no vision a people perish. Without a unifying vision, anger and fear win elections.
Culture
Compassionate Care During Illness and Loss: The True Nature of Suffering
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by Brenda Shoshanna
Many, many questions arise in our minds when someone close to us is seriously ill. It takes a while to realize that these questions do not have one answer. They have many answers, appear in different ways, and may have different impacts on us at different times. In a sense a finger is being pointed in our direction. These questions are demanding a response .
Health
How Health Reform will Lead to Single Payer
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This week I am in Denver at a different kind of Health Care Reform rally. Community Health Coalition activists from across the nation are meeting with one another and with the bureaucrats who write and enforce the regs. We are learning how health care reform regulations will be rolled out, what they will mean for our country, and how to incorporate them into our organizing practice. This is not a sign-waving rally like the beautiful event I attended in DC on October 2nd. We are sitting, not marching.
Earth-based Religions
Genetically Modified Salmon or Can this Marriage be Saved
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What troubles me about genetic engineering is that we are considering only our own short term interests. I would like to see FDA and other authorities routinely consult shamans as well as scientists.
Christianity
Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks: "The Greatest Coming Out Story Ever Told"
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In this last installment of my interview with Bishop Gene Robinson, we discuss interpreting collective story in an inclusive fashion culminating in Gene’s interpretation of Exodus as “The Greatest Coming Out Story Ever Told.” Feel free to check out the first two installments if you are so moved:
Morning Feature: Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks About Obama and “The Left”
Furthermore! Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks: From Tolerance to Empathy
LR: In organized religion, there seems to be a tendency to substitute a particular interpretation of a collective ambiguous story for the story itself. And often, the narrow interpretation excludes specific people from participating in the power structure. So as a bishop, you are now a participant in the power structure.
Empathy
Why I Gave 20 Vials of Blood for a Blogger
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Unless you have been blogging at community sites such as Daily Kos and Streetprophets, you probably do not know that a blogger who calls herself Kitsap River needs a kidney. Some of us contributed to the community quilts Sara R made for River and her husband, CharlesCurtisStanley. For the past year, I have been (somewhat ambivalently) completing requirements necessary to donate a kidney to River. River lives far from me, and even if she lived nearby, she is not someone I would have been likely to cross paths with. We frequent different worlds.
Empathy
Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks About Obama and "The Left"
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A few weeks ago, the congregants of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe were honored by a visit from Bishop Gene Robinson who delivered the evening’s d’Var Torah. Bishop Robinson is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. He was invited to Santa Fe as Grand Marshall of the Gay Pride parade. When Rabbi Marvin Schwab learned from a colleague at St. Bede’s that Bishop Robinson might be barred from speaking in an Episcopal Church, he invited him to deliver the Friday Night D’Var Torah at Temple Beth Shalom.
Culture
A Community Celebrates Its Impossible HCR Achievement
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For years, Rio Arriba County has been the butt of jokes about its high overdose death rates and its supposed lack of coordination between providers. But on August 25, over 350 people showed up at my office (a huge crowd for a working day in Espanola!) to celebrate our town’s health care reform success. (More)
We were joined by our county commissioners, Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM), state legislators, our Secretary of Health, children, reporters, friends, musicians and a truckload of shelter dogs. We danced, listened to northern New Mexico folk music, feasted, heard speeches and adopted pets, all to celebrate an extraordinary local achievement. And while we were at it, we published op-eds and secured coverage in three newspapers and a radio station explaining the benefits of health care reform.
Health
Defusing Negativity
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If you have followed my recent posts, you know that I believe the recent right-wing push towards extreme bigotry and hate-mongering is a sign of desperation. America’s demography is changing. it is growing younger and browner. At the same time, population is shifting from the northeast and midwest, to the so-called sunbelt: states with large Hispanic population. The Bush regime recognized the growing importance of the Hispanic vote, and worked aggressively to reach out.
Culture
Unemployment, Fear, and What We Can Do
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A manager in a failing department store runs to the bathroom and throws up, consumed with the fear of losing her health benefits which, even with COBRA, will cost too much. A teacher wakes up multiple nights a week with his whole body clenched, dreading that California’s annual pink slip won’t be retracted this time. A factory worker grieves the loss of friendship and socializing at work as much as the lost income. Very likely everyone reading this knows someone who has recently lost a job. Unemployment is a strange word; defined negatively, it fails to convey the meaning of an often devastating experience (though one that, together, we can mitigate).