Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/politics/page/82/)
Posts about politics and social change, from a spiritual progressive perspective
What set the United States apart from other developed countries was the nature of its response to unemployment following the manufacturing shift overseas — government support for Americans in the bottom half turned out to be too meager to hold society together.
At first glance, the fields of economics, religion, and comics seem utterly apart; a combination of two of them, let alone all three, would seem incongruous. However, in her innovative work, economist, artist, and activist Kate Poole delivers impassioned yet playful critiques of capitalism from a spiritual perspective.
As my physical body grows old and older, there is in parallel, an essence aware of itself that becomes younger and younger. Two opposite movements that don’t contradict each other in any way as there is a sense of wonder in becoming older/younger at the same time. When life is seen as a miracle even the Holocaust is perceived as a gift of the One and Only Force of Nature. When we are identified with our physical body, trying endlessly to meet its corporeal needs for food, sex, family, money, respect control and knowledge we see the world from the 1st story of a 10-story building. This perspective does not enable us to see much.
The rooms in the Eco Center are named for their floors. The Rubber Room’s floor is made from salvaged conveyor belts from the Arkansas Kraft paper mill and Granite Mountain Quarry. The Beer Bottle Bottom room is named for the several thousand beer bottles in the floor. And the Rock Around the Clock room gave new life to the thick rocks that maintained the terrace around Ferncliff’s old pool. These whimsical rooms prove that waste is never necessary.
Love is the power with which we can do more than we can even imagine. Whether we reflect on federal marriage rights today, or civil rights in Baltimore, consider that all holy texts hold love as a supreme value.
From Baltimore to Bujumbura, we human beings love to cling to our little boxes of hostility — boxes of race, religion, tribe, nation, party, ideology. In the name of our little boxes, we marginalize, ignore, oppress, and evil kill others, as if their lives don’t matter because they identify with another box.
Adam Smith’s work is misrepresented to say that no one, especially government, should interfere with the markets. But in Smith’s other major work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he argued that the happiness of individuals and of society as a whole depended in large measure on interventions by the state, outside the workings of the market.
Content from our print issue is usually only available to subscribers, but right now we’re offering free access (for a limited time only!) to one article from our current issue on The Place of Hope in An Age of Climate Disaster. Click here to read the article, “Hope Requires Fighting the Hope Industry.” If you are already a subscriber, please share this article with your friends! And if you have not yet subscribed, we invite you to check out this critical and engaging article to see what you are missing. Though hope is critical to any political or social activism, big energy, along with Republican climate change-deniers have created an illusory hope industry founded on American Exceptionalism. We cannot throw our hands up and leave the health of the planet (and humanity) to be secured by technology, capitalism, or future generations, writes Charles Derber.
When the power of a political community is legitimate, when it is recognized as legitimate by those who form the community, then there is no need for the violence of domination. It is only when legitimacy disappears that violence takes center stage. The power of the state, derived from the people, is suffering a crisis of legitimacy.
Without condoning the clashes with police, rock throwing, looting, and arson against local businesses, when a society generally and police forces more specifically consistently treat its citizens like “2s,” “3s,” or “4s,” when people see no hope for a better future, when parents fear for their children’s very lives, the inevitable eruptions in Baltimore should can come as no surprise.