10 years ago last weekend, 16 May 1998, was an important date. G8 leaders were at a conference venue in central Birmingham, Britain’s second city. An estimated 70,000 people were there to meet them, to bring the issue of debt relief to the forefront of the discussions. A massive movement had been mobilised, turning a minority campaign issue to the forefront of the agenda of the world’s most powerful countries.
For me, it was one of the defining moments of my life. Personally, it was one of the first events in the relationship with my wife, which eventually led to marriage in 2000. Emotionally, it was a great climax to an outpouring of emotion. We felt on top of the world. We felt that the leaders had met their match - and that was not the usual suspects, but Everyman and His Granny.
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Herb says in this thread:
speaking of putting our heads into the solution has anyone out there heard of Dorothy Day or read anything by or about her? She formed the Catholic Worker’s Movement in the 1930’s and was a huge cornerstone of social justice in the last century. She is said to have been a huge inspiration for Caesar Chavez. There has been a movement to make her a saint,whatever that’s called, but it won’t ever happen because she had a baby out of wedlock. She had a lot of communist and socialist friends before she became a Catholic but she ultimately rejected those philosophies because they lacked heart and faith (which is why she believed that they failed). Anyway she had her heart into solutions, not blame. I’m just looking for a way to get her name out there.
Has anyone ever heard of her? I highly recommend checking her out. Very inspiring. There are websites.
Including many listed in this google search
Posted in Activism, faith, heroes | No Comments »
So for all our fellow bloggers out there, I want to encourage you to participate in 10 days in the March 19 Iraq War Blogswarm. It has been nearly 5 years and 1 million deaths since the unprovoked U.S. invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation of Iraq. (Also don’t forget to tune in to live coverage of the Washington D.C. Winter Soldier Event on the web this Friday through Sunday.) The Blogswarm project says:
You are encouraged to write against the war from a variety of perspectives. The war is a huge problem, and that makes it an enormous subject for blogging. Here are some things you might want to consider if you are having difficulty making up your mind:
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Recently yotta-brilliant founder of Off The Map, Jim Henderson, introduced me to his extremely kewl niece, Alexa, and her zetta-awesome senior project, which I want to tell you about. Jim said:
I am so proud of my niece Alexa. How many young people when asked to create a Senior project would choose something as big, complex and important as ending Human Trafficking. Alexa is partnering with IJM which is probably the most respected organization in the world when it comes to this issue.
Alexa is a high school senior and she has put together what looks to be a fairly posh benefit dinner to raise funds for International Justice Mission. She has also built a pretty sweet web site to promote the dinner, as well as to educate people about human trafficking, at www.endhumanslavery.com I would totally encourage you to check out her web site, and if you are in the Seattle area, sign up for the benefit dinner, which happens the evening of March 14th in Bothell.
Alexa’s site has these quotes running at the top:
Human trafficking has become a $9 billion a year global industry and is increasingly an activity of organized crime.
Every 10 minutes a woman or child is trafficked into the United States for forced labor
Over 12 million people worldwide are trafficked for forced labor or sexual exploitation
IJM has some ideas about how we can begin to address this issue. But I’m wondering if any of you have any ideas/thoughts on how we can respond? What good news is there in the face of such horrible news?
Posted in Activism, Slavery, Women's Rights | 11 Comments »In this editorial published in the NY Times, conservative columnist David Brooks discusses Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama.
Kennedy went on to talk about the 1960s. But he didn’t talk much about the late ’60s, when Bill and Hillary came to political activism. He talked about the early ’60s, and the idealism of the generation that had seen World War II, the idealism of the generation that marched in jackets and ties, the idealism of a generation whose activism was relatively unmarked by drug use and self-indulgence…
And in the students’ rapture for Kennedy’s message, you began to see the folding over of generations, the service generation of John and Robert Kennedy united with the service generation of the One Campaign. The grandparents and children united against the parents…
The respect for institutions that was prevalent during the early ’60s is prevalent with the young again today. The earnest industriousness that was common then is back today. The awareness that we are not self-made individualists, free to be you and me, but emerge as parts of networks, webs and communities - that awareness is back again today.
I was wrong.
There, that wasn’t so difficult.
At university a lecturer told me that it was common for environmentalists to hold equal and opposite beliefs at the same time. Maybe I should have listened a little more carefully.
For most of my adult life, I’ve believed in the myth of fairtrade - which is the concept that poor farmers get a better price for their crops by encouraging thoughtful and good-willing consumers to pay a premium for their products. Initially I thought it was an idea which would change the world. Later I revised that to believe that it was at least doing something positive for the families who grew fairtrade products. At the same time I believed that there was something seriously wrong with world trade when the rich got everything they dreamed of whilst the poor suffered.
Over 15 years (and many, many others have been at it much longer), we wrote letters to supermarkets, held street protests, repeated various stunts to bring the public’s attention to the unfair way that the poorest farmers were treated and the good of choosing fairtrade. Eventually we persuaded the supermarkets that there was an ‘ethical’ market and that consumers would - shockingly - pay more for certain products. Suddenly ethical was mainstream.
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But the truth is that their activities are becoming harder every day. In a state in which the gods of death and money rule, in a state where the economy is flourishing while the children are hungry, where the mythological heroes are fearless murderers, where the leaders openly and publicly admit that human life is not worth a fig in their eyes, in a state that sends its sons to be killed without even bothering to invent a reason for it, in a state that imprisons millions of human beings in ghettoes and enclosures and kills them slowly, the persistent quiet voice of the Women in Black is the strongest conscientious voice of refusal.
Dr Nurit Peled-Elhanan an Israeli peace activist and professor at Hebrew University. She was a founder of the Parents Circle—Families Forum. Following the death of her 13-year-old daughter, Smadar, in a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem in September 1997, she became an outspoken critic of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza speaking at a conference of the Women in Black movement last weekend.
Allowing for a little hyperbole, Dr Nurit could have been speaking about us. Our communities where young men go off to die and politicians play dice with people’s lives.
In the midst of the electioneering of 2008 (oh God can it really be that long?) please cut through the fancy words of your politicians and their greed for power. Listen out for your fiercest critics. Challenge those who seek power to explain how their agenda will help the weakest, the lowest, the most ignored, the ones whose votes count for least in the corridors in Washingon, Toyko and London.
And in time, we may even get the politicians we deserve.
Posted in Activism, Ethics, Women's Rights | 2 Comments »This wikinews story from yesterday reminded me of this TED talk by musician Peter Gabriel. Witness works with human rights groups around the world distributing cameras and helping people to document human rights abuses.
From the TED talk:
The thing that really amazed me that I had now idea was that you could suffer in this way and then have your whole experience, your story, denied, buried, or forgotten. And it seemed whenever there was a camera around, a video or film camera, it was a great deal harder to do, for those in power to bury the story
From the Witness website:
WITNESS uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. We empower people to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools for justice, promoting public engagement and policy change.
I love this because in a sense witness is about giving away power to the powerless, which is one of my favorite ideas, and really one of the great redemptive ideas that lies behind a lot of the great stories that I find most moving. It makes me want to somehow get more involved in that power transfer, helping to make it happen.
Posted in Activism, Torture, Videos, technology | 3 Comments »
In honor of the 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Benjamin and I wanted to tell about a recent experience that our two families have shared. Earlier this year, my daughter Anna and her 5th grade classmates read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Anna was deeply moved by the story and learned that children worldwide express their hope for peace by sending paper cranes to be placed on a statue of Sadako. We learned that there was a Sadako statue in Seattle Peace Park, so Anna folded 100 cranes and we mailed them to Benjamin and Megan. This picture is of their lovely daughters Eowyn (left) and Coco hanging the cranes. I will let Anna share more about the story of Sadako and about her wish for peace…
Sadako Sasaki was an ordinary 11 year old Japenese girl, that had survived the Hiroshima bombing when she was 2 years old. Nine years later, she had a dizzy spell on the playground at school. She was brought to the school nurse and she told Sadako’s family that they should have her checked out at a hospital. So they did and sure enough Sadako had luekemia, “the atom bomb disease”. She was shipped to a hospital for people with diseases, mostly luekemia, and while she was in the hospital, her friend visited her and gave her a crane she had folded. There is a Japanese tale that if a sick person folds one thousand paper cranes, the gods will make them better. Her friend taught her how to fold them and she got started. For a long time she stayed in the hospital, folding cranes. She got over 600 folded, but she died before she was done. Her classmates folded the rest and buried them with her.
In Hiroshima, Japan there was an enormous statue made of her, and a smaller one in Seatle, Washington. To this day, children all over the world show their wish for peace by making paper cranes and hanging them on the statues. I decided to make cranes and send them to the Adys in Seatle. Folding cranes was extremely hard at first, but my hands got used to the motions and it was really easy after I made a bunch! My mom had this cool idea to use junk mail and magazine pages for the cranes and I did. It was cool, and a good use of junk mail! The cranes I folded stand for a wish for peace and justice in the world. I did this for Sadako, and because it was fun! :-) Also, thank you Eowyn and Coco for hanging the cranes!
Posted in Activism, Peace | 5 Comments »Shopping is a drag, and that is not just because of my gender. For example, take our regular food shopping. We believe in co-ops, so we foresake the local equivilent of Walmart and head for a local food shop owned by our regional food co-operative. There is no parking. There isn’t much choice on the shelves.
One of the reasons we buy from a co-operative is that it has a policy of aggressive labelling. They tell me things other supermarkets keep silent about.
We have several things to check. First we engage in active boycotts of some brands, most importantly (and perhaps most ineffectually) the longstanding Nestle boycott. Next we girlcott products we really like - most notably fairtrade labelled products. We then look at other products and weigh up whether the distance travelled justifies their purchase so the breakfast cereal containing chinese strawberries is left behind. Wherever possible, UK or at least local European products are bought.
Clothes shopping is somewhat simpler: as we are disgusted by the behaviour of most clothing brands and on a limited budget, 90% of our clothing comes from charity/thrift stores. We figure that although we can’t be any more sure of the origins of the stuff from thrift stores, at least someone benefits from our purchasing.
Our approach is that although we cannot totally change ourselves overnight, we can make continual improvements. Each year we conduct a family audit where we identify more things we can focus on and change.
In truth, we have a long way to go to reach the goal of personal sustainability. The more you think about it, there more there is to change.
Here are some useful resources:
Food shopping: The LOAF principle
Ethical living: Do-able hints
Clothing: All you never wanted to know about cheap clothing.