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!
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.
“This morning I saw three children die. Pretty thirteen-year-old girls wearing dresses over their jeans. They were out in a woods near here, picking fruit, and a helicopter came over the trees and strafed them. We heard the shots. Fifteen minutes later an alert defense patrol shot the helicopter down, twenty miles north, and the pilot and another man in the helicopter were killed but one is alive. Codi, they’re American citizens, active-duty National Guards. It’s a helicopter from the US, guns, everything from Washington. Please watch the newspapers and tell me what they say about this. The girls were picking fruit. When they brought them into the town, Oh God. Do you know what it does to a human body to be cut apart from above, from the sky? We’re defenseless from that direction, we aren’t meant to have enemies attack us from above. The girls were alive, barely, and one of the mothers came running out and then turned away saying, “Thank you, Holy Mother, it’s not my Alba.” But is was Alba. Later, when the families took the bodies into the church to wash them, I stayed with Alba’s two younger sisters. They kept saying, “Alba braided our hair this morning. She can’t be dead. See, she fixed our hair.”
Prior to our telephone conversation, I had asked our bloggers to contribute questions.I read the questions to Shane and asked him to share his thoughts…
The first question was from Joe, “Ask him about making his own clothes.Yes, you heard me correctly. The guy. Makes. His own. Clothing.”Laughing, Shane explained, “I love making my clothes!My mom taught me; we sew together almost liturgically every Christmas the clothes for the next year.”
He shared that he caught the vision while living in Calcutta in a village of people with leprosy.Since they were completely cut off from the rest of society, they had to make their own clothes and shoes, grow their own food and be a fully self-sustaining community.Shane found himself mesmerized with the way of life that they had created, “a new society in the shell of the old.”
This is the January 18, ‘07 edition in a once-a-week series of posters (warning: some of them have fairly graphic images of death and destruction) that Washington state based activist and college student Thomas Hays has been producing since June 2004. The numbers reflect the relatively conservative death toll being reported by Iraq Body Count. In April this year, Hays started including the numbers from the Lancet Report as well.
Hays said about the posters
“The idea (for the posters) came about when I was watching the news with some older people, Vietnam War-era people, and we were saying the images on television (today) were about children running up to tanks. It wasn’t about … war. In Vietnam, you’d see people getting blown up on the news. We started brainstorming ways to get the real images out to the kids being recruited for the military, and we came up with posters.”
The posters have stirred up controversy and anger among some who have seen them as being anti-American or anti-troops. They have caused Hays some trouble with the city of Seattle as the posters have been glued to telephone poles all over the city by anti-war activists during the last 3 years. It does seem like a fairly volatile, simple way of getting one’s point across.
What’s your reaction?
Do you think the media has whitewashed/censored the reality of the Iraq War, especially as compared to their coverage of the Vietnam War? How has this prolonged/enabled the war?
You know how you can start searching for something on the internet and then wind up someplace else? Recently, I discovered this video of Bill Clinton annoucing his “wish” at the TED awards. It was on someone’s blog (http://www.matchmine.com/blog/2007/05/03/the-ted-prize).
From the blog,
Bill Clinton won the prize this year, and elected to speak about his attempts to right the non-deeds of his administration in Rwanda.
I was so moved by that statement and Bill’s speech, I had to share it wth others. I ask as you listen and watch the video that you set aside any of your preconceived notions of who Bill Clinton is.
That’s the message I left with after hearing Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof speak at the University of Oregon’s three day symposium Witnessing Genocide: Representation and Responsibility. Mr. Kristof gave the final keynote address of the symposium, “Covering the First Genocide of the 21st Century: Reporting From Darfur.”
I know, I know. Three days of talking about Genocide? The very idea makes a person want to run far away to avoid an overwhelming feeling of complete helplessness. I’ll admit that did keep me from attending the whole event, but the chance to hear Mr. Kristof in person overrode my flight instinct. So the four of us (Rachel and I along with our spouses) found some of the last seats in the room – boy I’d forgotten how small and uncomfortable classroom desk/chair combos are – to hear from this witness to genocide.
Much of what Mr. Kristof said will not surprise anyone who makes the effort to follow news about this atrocity taking place in Sudan, Africa. I won’t go into all the details he covered, but instead focus more on his thoughts about response and steps toward resolution.
Over this last week I’ve had a couple smallish opportunities to do something smallish and been encouraged in both of them. First of all I finally followed up on a suggestion from Julie Clawson, and bought fair trade sugar from Amazon. We had run out of sugar (probably not a bad thing) and so I though it an ideal time. However, I was feeling a little guilty, because this sugar costs 4 times “normal” sugar, and we are not exactly in brilliant financial straits at this time. My friend Karl (a Mennonite, interestingly), encouraged me in this. He said that I am simply assuming the full fair price of the sugar, instead of outsourcing that full cost to someone else who is actually a lot worse off than me financially. This made me feel good. I also felt stoked when I actually received the box full of 10 one pound boxes of sugar via Amazon. I read the little blurb on the back about the Alter Trade Foundation and their Alter Eco Products, and I felt rather proud of myself.
The other thing I did this last week was inspired by Anna and by something Brian Mclaren said at an event I recently went to. He said that one of the evil results of nationalism is that nobody cares about any place. That is, we think of ourselves as Americans, and thus not as a member of this little neighborhood above Nathan Hale High School. Brian said “Learn your address–not your street address–your environmental address. You live in a watershed. Something is happening in terms of water geographically and environmentally where you live. Check it out on google earth.” This got me to thinking about my particular watershed, and little old Thornton Creek down there and how stuff moves at various rates down into that, and gradually out into Lake Washington, Puget Sound, and the Pacific. And it made me notice litter. So I grabbed a plastic bag when my girls and I walked down to the park next to Thornton Creek, and we picked up litter along the way. My two preschool girls really got into. It became “It’s *my* turn to hold the bag” and “Look, there’s some more garbage–I’ll get it!”. Made me feel really good in lots of ways.
In preparation for our telephone conversation, I had asked our blog participants to contribute questions.I read the questions to Shane and asked him to share his thoughts…
The first question was from Joe, “Ask him about making his own clothes.Yes, you heard me correctly. The guy. Makes. His own. Clothing.”Laughing, Shane explained, “I love making my clothes!My mom taught me; we sew together almost liturgically every Christmas the clothes for the next year.”
He shared that he caught the vision while living in Calcutta in a village of people with leprosy.Since they were completely cut off from the rest of society, they had to make their own clothes and shoes, grow their own food and be a fully self-sustaining community.Shane found himself mesmerized with the way of life that they had created, “a new society in the shell of the old.”
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…
