Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/11/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
Activist and Tikkun contributor David A. Sylvester, recently returned from Honduras, is asking you to “help tip the balance toward peace and away from violence and repression.” Read the full article to find out how you can help!
Marisa Handler, a native Capetonian, reflects on the water crisis in Capetown, which is on the verge of becoming the first major city to exhaust its water supply: “it’s a dire parable about the convergence of climate change, inept governance, and collective denial.”
Help us celebrate Rabbi Lerner’s 75th by making a video telling us what you appreciate about him, Tikkun, and/or the Network of Spiritual Progressives!
Giorgio Gomel reflects on the Israeli government’s selective response to racist and anti-Semitic events worldwide, and reminds us that “[t]here is indeed an objective interest of Jews in fighting discrimination even when it does not hurt them directly and immediately.”
In this poem, Mandy Fessenden Brauer reimagines the experience of growing up in a boys’ boarding school in light of the #MeToo movement: “I let it go on and on until it became / regular, like a glass of water before / sleeping.”
Most people seem to believe both that punishing men is successful at protecting and supporting women, and that nothing other than punishment could be. I question both.
This Martin Luther King holiday, I attended an annual community celebration in East St. Louis that, this year, commemorated the 50th anniversary of King’s death. Its theme was “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community,” which is also the title of a book King published in 1967. This King holiday found the public discourse a buzz with the question of whether or not the president of the United States, Donald Trump, is a racist because of remarks he made calling Haiti along with African and Latin American countries “shitholes.” In a meeting with congress-members regarding legislation around immigration, he also expressed a preference for people from countries such as Norway to immigrate to the United States.
I pulled out this old “historic” poster and put it up on our refrigerator today, after the false alarm went out to Hawaiians that an incoming (presumably nuclear) missile was on its way. My grown children will recognize the poster, because it was on our refrigerator for years. I began my career as an activist in 1979, when I realized the extent of the very real danger of nuclear war.I was engaged in the peace and anti-nuclear movement the whole time they were growing up. They remember carrying candles and walking from Pioneer Park to the Broad Street Bridge in Nevada City each year on August 6, Hiroshima Day. During the election year of 1984, I was a paid organizer for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign’s Political Action Committee (PAC), Freeze Voter ’84, which I worked on here in Nevada County.
Heard about NFL players taking a knee in protest during the National Anthem? Ron Seigel would like to suggest an alternative: displaying signs that emphasize “Liberty and Justice for ALL.”
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away there was a world where there could be found no black woman who could speak more than a sentence. It was a world of the most strange creatures and robots and technologies, but black women could only be seen in the background, usually at a bar or some place of entertainment. It was a period of civil war where rebels were fighting a war of resistance against evil forces in the universe. It was a world where The Force, a power that holds all things together in balance, both the good and the evil, the light and the dark could be summoned for the sake of restoring justice and peace to the galaxy. But, there were no black women of any consequence to be found.