Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/75/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
The events of this week highlight the striking advantage that the villains hold. Simply put, they have access to guns and some have a willingness to use them. A single person full of hate can destroy the potential of nine loving people in moments. Love, on the other hand, takes time.
The best way to support the Pope is to build an interfaith movement based on these values articulated in the New Bottom Line. It is only when people begin to see a spiritual progressive movement in the public sphere with a strategy for how to save the planet that is willing to challenge the fundamentals of global capitalism that they will be able to imagine overcoming their own passivity, emotional depression, and mistaken certainty that “nothing will ever make possible a new economic system.”
Why, why, why in 2015 canonize someone who represents such bad theology and bad intercultural values, utterly lacking the respect and humility that lie at the foundation of interfaith work and beliefs and values? No one who has passed Psychology 101 can believe in a masochistic treatment of one’s body in the name of a Creator God any longer, and no one who believes in a God of Justice can possibly subscribe to sadistic treatment of people of other faith traditions or no faith tradition. Sadism is not a virtue.
In reaction to a New York Times article, Blumenfeld struggles with whether or not he can forgive the oppressive institutions (particularly Christian) that are starting to open up discussions about alternative genders and sexual identities. Trying to balance an acknowledgment of the societal progress in LGBT rights with the fact that there is still rampant and unacceptable systematic oppression of the LGBT community leaves him on a bittersweet, yet extremely honest note.
In a piece written in honor of LGBTIQ Pride Month, Blumenfeld recalls an moment in the Gay Rights movement. In the past century, some members of the scientific community viewed people attracted to their own sex, those attracted to both males and females, and trans people as constituting distinct biological or “racial” types — those who could be distinguished from “normal” people through anatomical markers. This “medicalization” of homosexuality, bisexuality, and gender non-conformity only serves to strengthen oppression and heterosexual and cisgender privilege through its relative invisibility. Given this invisibility, issues of oppression and privilege are neither analyzed nor scrutinized, neither interrogated nor confronted by members of the dominant group.
The keys to the magic kingdom of the soul as well as soul retrieval is gratefulness, and gratefulness and eventually forgiveness ends with our self. Each one of the participants included in this article have been guided to perceive their war experience as a Quest or journey to where they are now.
Consistent with the principle that anything not expressly prohibited by God is permitted, Jewish law, or halacha, generally takes a permissive position on GMO food. But just because halacha doesn’t expressly prohibit GMO food, doesn’t mean it’s entirely silent on the issue.
What happens when you close a struggling school “for the good of the students” and farm the kids off to charters? Very few researchers have talked about public schools as a source of precious jobs in desperate communities. What happens to the student whose mom used to be a “lunch lady,” a job with benefits, who now is unemployed? At a Working Class Studies panel at Georgetown University, teacher and education blogger Jose-Luis Vilson pointed out that the loss of public employment hurts the black community especially.
The APVs (Afghan Peace Volunteers) are running an alternative school for kids in Kabul, which, by making the poorest children in Kabul literate, gives them better opportunities. After getting to know about 20 families whose children work in the streets as the family’s breadwinner, the APVs devised a plan through which each family receives a monthly sack of rice and large container of oil to offset the family’s financial loss for sending their children to informal classes at the APV center and preparing to enroll them in school. Through continued outreach among Afghanistan’s troubled ethnicities, APV members now include 80 children in the school and hope to serve 100 children soon.
The importance of electing politicians with strong critical thinking skills is revealed by the spectrum of opinions politicians hold about climate change: some officials deny the problem, while others confidently identify humanity as the culprit of environmental degradation. Warren Blumenfeld passionately investigates disbelievers’ opinions by reviewing some of Rick Santorum’s comments about climate change.