Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/194/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
You may not have caught this news: “L.A. had fewer crimes last year than it did in 1957 – the mayor calls the numbers ‘mind-boggling’.”
But we all know that: “Los Angeles – like other big cities around the country – is in the midst of a crime drop so steep and profound, it has experts scratching their heads.”
On an alarmingly milder-than-normal January day this month, about 100 religious leaders representing Jewish, Christian, Catholic, Islamic, Native American, Buddhist traditions gathered in the historic New York Avenue Presbyterian Church before processing in a silent march two blocks to the north side of the White House for a “pray-in for the climate.”
The solar industry has been devastated in the last three years by excess supply, declining demand, and falling prices. The good news is that several recent bankruptcies have helped the supply problem. The recent price declines have also helped to make large solar farms more price competitive with coal and natural gas for generating electricity.
If we are to have a war on terrorism, if Al-Qaida and its ilk are going to have a war on us, if all of us, together, are going to make war, the suffering will go on and on. From torture, from bombs; of soldiers, of civilians; of men, of women, of children; of other species, of the earth.
Medical insurers around the country are announcing a new round of double-digit premium
increases, belying the promise that Obamacare would reduce costs of health care. Although the
“Affordable” Health Care Act is not yet fully implemented, it is reasonable to assume that the
further expansion of benefits will dwarf the promised savings as detailed in the error-filled CBO
report Democrats use to justify the claim.
The news that Sen. Chuck Schumer will support the Hagel nomination means that Hagel will almost certainly be confirmed as Secretary of Defense. It does not mean that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is not opposing the appointment. It means that, at long last, it has been defeated.
I do think that the best cure for the paralyzing helplessness that can follow reading the news, a despair I have been prone to at times throughout my life, is not so much reading the good news, as getting stuck into work that helps people.
Still, the good news can help. So maybe the ship is going down. But in the long run, we’re all dead, the planet fries and the sun explodes. And today, it helps me to concentrate on the work I can do, to recall how despairing I was about the world population explosion, global poverty and child mortality forty years ago, and then to realize how much has improved, due to the work of people who didn’t allow despair to paralyze them.
Around the country, people are polarized about whether gun control or widespread ownership of guns would make us safer. I have written earlier about the U.S. culture of violence and the growing economic inequity, which is violent in itself and is linked to increasing violence. Today’s post addresses the violent “myth” that underlies our culture:
On Wednesday, January 9, nearly 2,000 people rallied against fracking outside of Governor Cuomo’s State of the State Address, in Albany, New York.
For here you must decide what it means to say that God is sending “my servant David.” Why, King David’s been dead for hundreds of years, for God’s sake. Who exactly is coming?