Today's commentary:
http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-09/02albert.cfm

ZNet Commentary

Embark Now

September 02, 2005
By Michael Albert

In the U.S. summer is winding down. Soon U.S. students will trek back to school, including college. Would that I was one of them, not because it would mean I was forty years younger - though that would be a nice turn of events - but because this is the first Fall semester in thirty years I have felt the desire to be scaling ivy walls and prowling campus corridors.

What's coming to NYU, Wisconsin, SF State, MIT, Howard, Pepperdine, Morehouse, Purdue, Loyola? What's coming to Drake, Kansas State, Rutgers, Boston University, University of Chicago, Duke, Berkeley, Kent State? What's coming to Reed, Bucknell, Colombia, Vanderbilt, Austin, Evergreen, Concordia, Yale, Jackson State - and all the rest?

Tumult, turmoil, tension, and resistance? Rejection and revolt? That's what ought to happen. It's what I hope will happen.

Flash back to May 1970: Richard Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia. Already intense campus unrest dramatically escalated. National guard shot to death four students at Kent State University. Campuses erupted. Two were killed and twelve wounded at Jackson State. About 2,000 students were arrested in the first half of May 1970. Campuses were declared in a state of emergency in Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and South Carolina.
At least a third of the nation's nearly 3,000 colleges had strikes. Over 80% of all colleges and universities had protests. Approximately four million students, half the country's total, and 350,000 faculty members actively participated in strikes. Buildings were shut down. Highways were blocked. Campuses were closed. Nixon's Scranton Commission reported that roughly three quarters of all students supported the strikes. Pollsters reported that within campuses alone over a million people claimed to favor revolution and called themselves revolutionaries.
In early 1971 the New York Times reported that four out of ten students, about three million people, thought a revolution was needed in the United States. This upsurge and the civil rights and then black power movement, the women's movement, the antiwar movement, and the youth rebellion behind it, together threatened the very fabric of society and thereby helped end a war and turn the country's mentality inside out and upside down.
Racism was under seige. Sexism was in retreat. Suburban culture was tottering. A gigantic war machine felt shackles. Even capitalism had cracks. But the desire to attain a better world did not last sufficiently long or grow sufficiently wide to replace Washington's White House and Wall Street's corporations which, instead, went on producing greed and domination. Capitalism's institutional persistence slowly eroded and even devoured my generation's aspirations for solidarity and self management.

Flash forward thirty five years to next week: Imagine students back on their campuses. Do they discuss what courses to take? Ways to hook up with new guys or gals? Upcoming athletic seasons? I'd be surprised if not, but I hope students' also focus on war and peace. I hope they focus on New Orleans, and why calamities afflict the poor so much worse than all others. I hope they focus on why life in the world is so much less than it could be for the starving, the bombed, the unemployed, and for those working at jobs that rob dignity, stifle creativity, and subject so many souls to stupefying rule by others.

I hope they even talk about working at elite jobs and having no time to live, no space to be humane, and no meaning beyond the next dollar. I hope students' main topic this Fall is what they want out of life, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and yes, materially, and how they are going to get it consistent with their working hard for everyone else getting it too.

Imagine students asking why their curriculums produce ignorance about international relations, ignorance about market competition's violations of solidarity, sagacity, and sustainability.

Imagine students deciding enough is enough. Maybe one particular student who wears a funny hat and has a history of being aloof, or perhaps one who looks straight as a commercial and was high school class most likely to have a million friends, will write a song about masters of the universe - and unseating them. Maybe another student will write about floods drowning people's hopes, and about a rising tide of our own compassionate creation lifting people's prospects. Maybe another student will write about resurgent racism and sullying sexism, and then about combative communalism and feminism and their time finally coming. And maybe students will hum the new tunes and sing the new lyrics - and rally, march, sit in, occupy, all while waving a big, solid fist.

Imagine students not just sending out emails to their friends and allies, but entering dorms and knocking on every door, initiating long talks, communicating carefully-collected information and debating patiently-constructed arguments that address not only war and poverty, but also positive prospects we prefer.

Imagine students earmarking fraternity and sorority members, athletes, and scholars, for conversation, debate, incitement, and recruitment. Imagine students come to see their campuses as places that should be churning out activists and dissent and come to see themselves as having no higher calling than making that campus-wide dissent happen.

Imagine students schooling themselves outside the narrow bounds of their colleges, learning that there is an alternative to cutthroat competition and teaching themselves to describe that alternative and to inspire others with it, to refine it, and especially to formulate and implement paths by which to attain it.

Imagine students, now sharing many views and much spirit, angry and also hopeful, sober and also laughing, sitting in dorms and dining areas forming campus organizations, or even campus chapters of a larger encompassing national community of organizations - perhaps something called students for a participatory society this time around - or even students for a participatory world - and maybe even having each chapter choose its own local name. Dave Dellinger SPS. Emma Goldman SPS. Malcolm X SPS. And for that matter, Rosa Luxembourg SPS, Emiliano Zapata SPS, Che Guevara SPS. And so on.

Imagine, in short, students rising up with information, relentless focus, and some abandon too, becoming angry, militant, and aggressive, but keeping foremost mutual concern and outreaching compassion.

Imagine all this pumping into the already nationally growing U.S. dissent against war and injustice, pumping into the neighborhood associations and union gatherings and church cells and GI resistance, a youth branch willing to break the laws of the land and to push thoughts and deeds even into revolutionary zones. Imagine students singing, dancing, marching, and law breaking up a storm.

That is something the antiwar movement, the anti corporate globalization movement, the movement for civil rights and against racism and sexism, the movements for local rights against environmental degradation, the movements for consumer rights against corporate commercialism, and the labor movement too, all need.

We need youth.

Imagine young people, with time, energy, heart, and mind, discerning that they are being coerced by society most often to become passive victims, sometimes to become passive agents, occasionally to become active perpetrators but only as cruel and rich beneficiaries of society's injustices. Imagine students seek more and other. Imagine they hunker down for the long haul, much better equipped and much better oriented than my generation ever was.

I think, I hope, students are about to not only reject statist war and corporate greed, but to carry that rejection into positive advocacy and anger that gives entire campuses and not small sub communities sustained commitment. That will be a ticket to a new world for everyone, a ticket much better than old style graduation into the morally decrepit world all around us. This trip is long. But why not embark now?

Katrina, God and Social Morality

Katrina, God and Social Morality

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

It didn’t have to happen. And it didn’t have to result in so many deaths and social chaos.

Before going down the route of spiritual analysis, let me pause for a moment of prayer and sadness for the suffering of the people of New Orleans, prayers for comfort of those who are mourning losses, and prayers for the survival of those who are still in danger. Prayer must always be accompanied
by acts of tzedaka, righteousness or charity. The American Red Cross is playing the lead support role here, so you might consider donating to them: call 1 800 HELP NOW.

But this is a classic case of the law of karma, or what the Torah warns of environmental disaster unless we create a just society, or what others call watching the chickens come home to roost, or what goes around come around:

* Environmentalists are making a strong case that the escalated number and ferocity of earthquakes is a direct product of global warming, caused in large part by the reliance on fossil fuels. The persistent refusal of the U.S. to join the nations of the world in implementing the Kyoto Accords emission limits, and to impose serious pollution restrictions on the cars being sold in the US, is a major factor in global warming.

* The development for housing and commercial purposes combinded with massive oil and gas investments destroyed the natural protections from storms that the coastal wetlands has previously provided.

· Funds that were specifically allocated for New Orleans which could have been used in rebuilding levees and for storm protection were cut from the federal budget so that President Bush could use those funds to wage the war in Iraq.
·
· The white majority of the people of Louisiana elected Congressional representatives who enthusiastically support the war in Iraq and the Bush Administration’s environmental irresponsibility. When economic devastation hit workers in northern cities over the past several decades, Louisianans voted to downsize the federal government and to let others fend for themselves. Many talked about the glories of relying on the free marketplace rather than on the “handouts” from a national government that they abhorred. Or they told the poor and the homeless in northern cities that “if they worked harder or had better habits or were smarter they’d have employment and wouldn’t have to depend on others’ help. Or they saw that suffering of others as “the hand of God.”

And yet, the law of karma or Torah doesn’t work on a one to one basis, delivering “just rewards” to those who have been directly involved in causing evil, as JOB noted in the Bible and as we can note watching global warming play out. The terrible truth is that it is the POOR, the MOST VULNERABLE, who are the first to suffer. The wealthy built their homes on higher ground, had better information, more insurance, and more avenues of escape. So whether it is in facing the rising waters in Bangladesh or Malaysia or Lousiana and Missippi, it’s going to be “the least among us” who will suffer most immediately. This is why it is inappropriate to blame the victim: because the way the world has been created, the consequences of past social injustice, war and ecological irresponsibility come to a whole planet--because from the cosmic perspective we are one, we are all interdependent—and those who suffer most are often not even those who are most culpable. Ditto with environmental cancers—it’s often not the oil company executives but poor people living in proximity to the air and water polluted by corporate irresponsibility and abetted by the lawmakers who depend on corporate contributions and pay them back by imposing the weakest possible environmental regulations.

When some Christian fundamentalists talk about these as signs of the impending doom of the planet, they are laughed off as irrational cranks. It’s true that these fundamentalists see no connection between the doom and the environmental irresponsibility that the politicians they support have brought us. But nevertheless, their perception that we are living at “the end of time” can’t be dismissed by those of us who know that the life support systems of this planet are increasingly “in danger” if politics continues the way it has been going, with politicians in BOTH parties capitulating regularly to the ethos of selfishness and materialism that is sustained by our corporate plunderers but is validated by the votes of ordinary citizens.

Yet the fundamentalist message is deeply misleading also, because it seems to suggest that all this is out of our hands, part of some divine scheme. But it’s not. The biblical version is quite different from what they say: it insists that the choice between life and death is in our hands. After laying out the consequences of abandoning a path of justice and righteousness, the Torah makes it clear that it is up to us. CHOOSE LIFE, it tells us. That choosing of life means transforming our social system in ways that neither Democrats nor Republicans have yet been willing to consider—toward a new bottom line of love and caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological responsibility, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe replacing a narrow utilitarian approach to Nature. This is precisely what we have been calling for in our Interfaith organization, the Tikkun Community, and in our new project of the Tikkun Community called The Network of Spiritual Progressives. We need a New Bottom Line—a fundamental transformation of what we value in this society. We want to take that message into the public sphere, into the political parties, into the media, into the schools, into the corporations.

What too frequently happens when disasters like this hit is that everyone gets momentarily worked up about helping the victims, then a few weeks later forgets the whole thing, and rarely do we get a serious discussion (much less “follow through”) about how to solve the underlying problems. Let’s not let that happen again. Please join the Network of Spiritual Progressives of The Tikkun Community. For more information about our perspective, go to the Core Vision at www.tikkun.org. To Join, click here: https://www.donate.net/tikkun/basket.asp?dept_id=965&shopper_id=399435.

There is one beautiful thing that sometimes happens during these kind of emergencies: the cynical realism that teaches us that people just care about themselves, a teaching that makes most of us feel scared to be “too generous” or “too idealistic” temporarily falls away, and people are allowed to be their most generous and loving selves. When the restraints are momentarily down, there is a huge outpouring of love, generosity and kindness on the part of many Americans. People do things like this that I saw yesterday: advertising on the internet’s Craig’s List that they are willing to take in to their own home for many months a family that has been displaced by the floods. This kind of selflessness is something that people actually yearn to let out, but under ordinary circumstances they’d fear to do so. So watch the goodness show itself.

Not to deny that ugliness will also appear. The looting of stores in New Orleans momentarily revealed the “bottom line” of government responsibilities when the New Orleans police announced that they were going to switch policing priorities from saving lives (of the poor) to saving the property of the wealthy and the corporations from the looters. It’s this kind of misplaced priorities over the course of many decades that makes some poor people (and not only poor people, but others who feel that they have a deep sense of social grievance) think (mistakenly and unjustifiably) that it makes sense to take advantage of this moment to rectify a long history of social injustice by taking from the “haves” to provide for themselves as the “have-nots.” It’s hard to witness this perversity on the part of both looters and police without a deep sadness of heart about the depths of depravity that reveal themselves in these moments, alongside the heights of goodness mentioned in the previous paragraph.

For me, this is a prayerful moment, entering the period just before the Jewish High Holidays (starting Oct. 3), realizing that the Jewish tradition of taking ten days of reflection, repentance and atonement is so badly needed not just by Jews but by everyone on the planet. I hope we can find a way to build this practice among secular as well as religious people, because America, indeed the whole world, so badly needs to STOP and reflect,repent and atone, and find a new way, a new path, and return to the deepest truths of love, kindness, generosity, non-violence and peace.

--Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun and co-chair (with Cornel West and Sister Joan Chittister) of the Tikkun Community
Author, The Left Hand of God (forthcoming in January from HarperSanFrancisco)
RabbiLerner@tikkun.org


P.S.--if you live in the Bay Area, and wish to be involved in the next stage (after our July Conference on Spiritual Activism) in building the Network of Spiritual Progressives(NSP), you are invited (whether or not you came to the conference) to the first Bay Area meeting of the NSP: Sunday, September 11. 4 p.m.-7 p.m. at the New College of California, 777 Valencia Street (near 19th in the Mission district) San Francisco. We will also commemorate the loss of live on 9/11 and in the subsequent misuse of 9/11 to justify more wars and militarism and torture and restrictions on civil liberties. Admission: a. Only for those who have read and agree with the organizational vision described fully in the Q&A about the Network of Spiritual Progressives which you need to read at :
http://www.spiritualprogressives.org/current_projects/currentproject.2005-07-29.3129706625
and b. You must bring a main course vegetarian dish to share for the pot-luck dinner that we will be having as part of this gathering.

If you don't live in the Bay Area, let us know when your next meeting of a local Network of Spiritual Progressives or TikkunCommunity chapter is going to take place, so that we can publicize it (to simone@tikkun.org)

If this message made sense to you, send it to everyone you think might benefit from hearing its message! And please help us out by clicking HERE to join The Tikkun Community so that we can continue to send these messages.

(Please email rabbilerner@tikkun.org or communitity@tikkun.org)

Rising-Moore to remain near Bush Ranch for duration of war

Sheehan, war protesters leave camp near Bush ranch

ANGELA K. BROWN
Associated Press

CRAWFORD, Texas - As Cindy Sheehan and other military families who oppose the war take their protest on the road after a 26-day vigil, a few demonstrators plan to keep camping out near President Bush's ranch until the war with Iraq ends.

Sheehan, whose 24-year-old son Casey died in Iraq last year, and other protesters plan to go Thursday afternoon to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's office in the Houston area.

Sheehan and several dozen demonstrators left Crawford on Wednesday in three buses for the 25-state "Bring Them Home Now Tour," which will end with an anti-war march Sept. 24 in Washington.

One bus went to U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's Dallas office. Sheehan's bus went to Austin, where nearly 2,000 attended a rally at City Hall after many of them marched from the state Capitol chanting and holding anti-war signs. About two dozen Bush supporters held a counter rally nearby.

"Thank you for being a bright spot in what is so-called Bush country," Sheehan, of Vacaville, Calif., told her cheering supporters.

Sheehan had vowed to stay in Crawford until Bush's monthlong vacation ended or until she could question him about the war that has claimed more than 1,870 U.S. soldiers' lives. She missed a week of the protest because of her mother's stroke.

"We're going to keep on questioning him, and we're going to keep on until our troops are brought home because there's no noble cause," she said. "And that's why George Bush couldn't come out and talk to me because he doesn't have a noble cause" for the war.

But the makeshift campsite she started Aug. 6 in ditches off the main road leading to Bush's ranch - visited by some 10,000 people - isn't gone. A few tents remain so several people can keep camping until the war with Iraq ends, said Carl Rising-Moore of Indianapolis, a member of Veterans for Peace.

"What happened here has created a shift of conscience on a global basis. It's famous. It needs to be remembered," Rising-Moore said. "And President Bush spends an incredible amount of time here."

But even a smaller camp may not continue if McLennan County commissioners approve an ordinance banning parking and congregating off any road within seven miles of the ranch. Commissioners are to vote next month on that ordinance, proposed by landowners upset over traffic problems caused by the protest camp.

Bush, who has said he sympathizes with Sheehan, returned to Washington on Wednesday without meeting with her in Texas. Two top administration officials talked to Sheehan the first day of her protest.

On Wednesday at a smaller pro-Bush camp in a ditch across the street from Sheehan's site, about a dozen people began taking down their tents, canopies and signs, and putting away cases of water and food.

The counter camp took shape slowly about a week after Sheehan arrived, starting with a few people holding pro-Bush signs and expanding to crowds of several hundred on weekends.

Even presidential adviser Karl Rove stopped by the site Tuesday night and hugged and thanked the Bush supporters, said Valerie Duty, who helped expand the pro-Bush camp two weeks ago.

"I love the troops, and I love President Bush, and I support his decision on the war all the way - 100 percent," said Mary Hitt of nearby Valley Mills, who spent much of the past 10 days at the site that Bush supporters dubbed "Camp Reality."

Many Bush supporters said the war protest hurt U.S. troop morale. Critics also said Sheehan never spoke out against Bush or the war when she and other grieving families met the president about two months after her son died last year.

Sheehan said she was still in shock over Casey's death during that meeting. She said she became enraged after independent reports disputed Bush administration claims that Saddam Hussein had mass-killing chemical and biological weapons - a main justification for the March 2003 invasion - and when she heard Bush say soldiers' deaths were noble.

---

AP staff writer Jim Vertuno in Austin contributed to this report.

© 2005 AP Wire and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.dfw.com

Immigrant Teens Subject to Aggressive Military Recruiting

Immigrant Teens Subject to Aggressive Military Recruiting

World Journal, News Feature, Isabelle Hsu.
Translated and compiled by Eugenia Chien,

Aug 31, 2005

At the pivotal time of graduating from high school, a military recruiter showered a Chinese high school student with friendship and promises of a speedy citizenship application. In two weeks, Wong Ken Moon, a high school student from Encinal High School in Alameda, California, signed a contract for at least eight years with the U.S. Marines.

Two months after signing the contract, Wong regretted his decision and wanted to back out of the contract on August 12. But he did not even know what type of contract he had signed or how to withdraw from it.

Wong is among the thousands of high school students targeted by campus military recruiters. Recruiters are using visa help to attract immigrant high school students, who are sometimes unaware of the obligations of the contract and how they can pull out of the contract if they change their minds.

Two weeks before graduation, with no definite future plans in mind, Wong met a young female Marine and agreed to be contacted by the Marine recruiter. Newton Dodson, a Marine recruiter based in San Leandro, met with Wong at the beginning of June. Just ten days after Dodson’s first meeting with Wong, he renewed Wong’s expired green card and promised him a speedy U.S. citizenship application.

The military offers non-immigrants expedited processing of visas, says Marti Hiken, co-chair of Military Law Task Force. The process can be as short as three years, compared to the normal five-year waiting period. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a 2004 legislation also allows members of the military to apply for naturalization for free.

Dodson told Wong he would receive $3000 when he reported for boot camp, and a pay raise every six months “because the government won’t go bankrupt.” Wong’s most pressing concern – how he would pay for college – was relieved when Dodson told him that he could go to college for free and serve at the same time. The chance of actually going to war, Dodson told Wong, was about 11 percent.

Dodson says that he does not remember if he told Wong that he could speed up the citizenship process. When asked about the chances of going to battle, he told the World Journal that everyone has a probability to go to war.

Wong was even more convinced that he should join the Marines when Dodson came to his high school graduation. His parents could not attend the graduation because they had to work that day.

Dodson even brought Wong to meet other young people who wanted to join the Marines. They listen to enlisted Marines telling cool war stories.

But when Wong signed the contract on June 11, Dodson was not with him. Under the prodding of officials at the Marines office, Wong signed what he thought was a five year contract. Dodson told the World Journal that the contract that Wong signed includes four years of active duty and four years of reserve duty. In a national emergency, he says that Wong can be on duty indefinitely. Wong says the Marines office did not give him a copy of the contract.

Although Wong’s parents were aware of his plans to enlist, they decided to let him make his own decisions. Dodson brought a Cantonese-speaking Marine representative to meet Wong’s parents and to welcome him to the Marines.

In July, after much consideration, Wong decided he wanted to withdraw from his contract. He decided that he was against the war, and that the military is not his only option. At an anti-war protest, he met Aimee Allison, a specialist who helps enlisted people withdraw from their contracts. Allison, a former G.I and a Gulf War resister, told him that as long as he had not reported to boot camp, he could legally pull out of his contract. She said there would be no negative impact on his career or citizenship application process and that the “no report, no enlist” policy applies to citizens and non-citizens.

Although it is optional, Wong sent a certified mail to the recruiting office to say that he had changed his mind.

Dodson says that every recruiter goes through recruiting training and is required to recruit at least two people every month. In the two years that he has been a recruiter, Wong is the second person to withdraw from his contract.

The military recruiting handbook suggests recruiters provide donuts and coffee for school staff, request to be a time keeper at football games, and gain an “indispensable” role in the school.” They are encouraged to seek out “student influencers,” students who stand out among their peers, and talk to them in front of other students.

Various military branches say that they do not target specific races in recruiting. The number of minorities has decreased in the military. According to Army records, minorities make up of 31 percent of the enlisted now, down from 37 percent five years ago. But the number of Asians has steadily increased from 2.6 percent in 2001 to 3 percent in 2005.

Wong says he changed his mind because he had been against the war in Iraq because the United Nations had been against American involvement from the beginning. He says he is for peace, so he does not want to participate in the military.

Life is too big of a question, Wong says, and he signed the contract too quickly. After he sent the certified letter to the recruiters, he registered for classes at a community college, hoping that in a short time, he can transfer to U.C. Berkeley. The Marine training camp in San Diego isn’t the next step in his life, he says.

Dozens of Vietnamese Americans Stranded Outside of New Orleans

Dozens of Vietnamese Americans Stranded Outside of New Orleans

Saigon Broacasting Television Network,
News Report, Staff -Compiled by Calitoday and translated by Andrew Lam,
Sep 01, 2005

According to Saigon Television Broadcasting Network there are dozens of Vietnamese Americans who are still stuck behind in a small town outside of New Orleans called Versailles. Versailles has been the home of more than 10,000 Vietnamese Americans since the Vietnam War ended.

In the last 3 days, without electricity and telephone contacts, the health of the Vietnamese community in Versailles is virtually unknown. Yesterday, Father Vien The Nguyen, of Lavang church in Versailles, managed to contact Saigon Broadasting Television Network to let them know that the majority of Vietnamese living in the area had evacuated before Katrina hit New Orleans, but there are dozens of senior citizens who did not leave because either they have no children or grandchildren to help them, or because they were hoping that they could withstand the storm. When the storm hit, they fled to the church for shelter and there they remained.

The town of Versailles is flooded, some places the water rose to 4 meters, accoridng to father Nguyen. Father Nguyen had decided to stay with those who took shelter in his church. The church is flooded as well but they have taken shelter upstairs. The priest said that he didn’t know if any Vietnamese had died in the Versailles but he was unable to leave the church to find out due to the flood.

Father Nguyen told SBTN that everyone in his church was listening to the news on the radio and had heard of the orders to evacuate. Since then they have been trying to contact the police for help and have been told that help will come. He also noted that he and his flock were still waiting for rescue but among those who were taking shelter at his church, many were beginning to show signs of failing health. Most didn’t have their medications with them, and many remained in shock. He asked all listeners to pray for them and for their rescue. The telephone line he was using was weak and his voice was often inaudible. Father Nguyen said that he will try to contact SBTN once they were rescued.

The Vietnamese American communities in Biloxi, Mississippi, and in Gulfport have also been evacuated, and the majority of this population have reached Alabama and Atlanta.