Toasters For Congress: A Video Contest

SumofChange — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:54:19 GMT

originally posted by Mitch Malasky at Sum of Change

Did you know that about 10 years ago, Ira Shorr of the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) sent a toaster to every member of congress to warm them about the danger of having nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alerts- "In the time that it takes to make toast, we could all be toast". Mr Shorr has been PSR's National Field Director for the last 25 years but is retiring this year. To celebrate his decades of activism for peace, our good friend David Hart (also the director of Grow the Hope) is holding a video contest for people to take their own stand on essential issues of our time, such as nuclear weapons and climate change. You can get all the info about the contest by going to www.PSR.org/video
We helped Ira and David by making some introductory videos for the contest, some of which are embedded below. The first videos is the story behind why he sent a toaster to every member of congress and the second discusses some of Ira's other work. Besides for the Toasters effort, Ira has embarked on several campaigns for global peace and justice, such as the SMART Security campaign, which was designed as an alternative to a military-first foreign policy agenda. You can learn all about these efforts in the second video.

I hope that you go to PSR.org/video, watch the rest of the videos up there, and submit your own video for the contest. It's a great chance to creatively express your views and hopefully change the world. I look forward to seeing what you have to offer.

To find out more information about the contest and to submit your video, go to www.PSR.org/video.

(VIDEO+PICS) Marching to the White House in Solidarity with Iranians

Rusty5329 — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:27:29 GMT

Originally posted at Sum of Change (you can find our pictures of the event there, lots of them).

The District of Columbia awoke to storms this morning. Huddled under an overhang outside the Iranian Consulate's office, were Americans and Iranian-Americans standing in solidarity with the people of Iran. Notwithstanding the rain, the crowd began its slow march, about two-and-a-half miles to the White House.

As they marched, the rain subsided, giving way to a gorgeous day, almost perfect for a demonstration. The crowd was loud and energetic,venting their anger, frustration, and concern. There was also a sense of hope, in light of an uprising in Iran on a scale not witnessed since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Young and old alike, expressed their inspiration.

(Check back at Sum of Change on Friday morning, June 26th, for our coverage of Thursday's health care rally)

Holding On to Our Humanity

teacherken — Sat, 30 May 2009 10:41:37 GMT

cross-posted from Daily Kos

A simple title, is it not? Yet the implications are immense. The demand not to turn away, or shut our eyes and ears to the suffering of others.

That is the topic of Bob Herbert's column this morning, entitled as is this diary, Holding On to Our Humanity. You need not read any further in this diary, because I have provided the link to Herbert, and I now tell you to go read. Not convinced? Then try his first paragraph:

Overload is a real problem. There is a danger that even the most decent of people can grow numb to the unending reports of atrocities occurring all around the globe. Mass rape. Mass murder. Torture. The institutionalized oppression of women.

I will quote more, but not enough. And I will offer a few words of my own. But again, if you have read all of Herbert, you can stop. I am satisfied.
Herbert has stepped onto the ground about which often his colleague Nicholas Kristof writes, Darfur. He also finds occasion to reference Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel, noting that the latter warns us about the very human tendency to "draw a curtain" across the worst of the world, to instead immerse ourselves in the ordinary concerns of our own lives, a tendency Wiesel warns us we must fight.

As to Kristof, he had written so much about the suffering and horrors of Darfur that Herbert wondered what there was new to learn from a report by a team of researchers who traveled to Chad to interview women survivors of Darfur, the report to be released by Physicians for Human Rights tomorrow.

Elie Wiesel has so often been the voice that speaks words others would prefer not to hear. He once said

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

At the dedication of the U. S. Holocaust Museum, while ethnic conflict and cleansing had already begun in the former Yugoslavia, Wiesel challenged President Clinton. We can read in the story of that event in the NY Times the following:

"We cannot tolerate the excruciating sights of this old new war," Mr. Wiesel said, turning to Mr. Clinton. "Mr. President, this bloodshed must be stopped. It will not stop unless we stop it."

Let me offer two more quotes from Wiesel appropriate to this diary before I return to Herbert's piece:

Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.

Because of indifference, one dies before one actually dies.

Herbert's last two paragraphs also includes powerful words from Elie Wiesel. Let me first quote the penultimate:

"It is so much easier to look away from victims," said Mr. Wiesel, in a speech at the White House in 1999. "It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes."

rude interruptions - after all, why should we not be focused on our own work, dreams and hopes? Why should we do more than perhaps nod in acknowledgment at the suffering around the world. After all, how are we responsible? Here perhaps I could again quote the well-known words of Pastor Martin Niemoller inscribed on the wall of that Holocaust Museum at whose dedication Wiesel spoke. Instead, let me offer as my last selection from Herbert's column what he chooses as his ending, the continuation of words from Wiesel:

But indifference to the suffering of others "is what makes the human being inhuman," he said, adding: "The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees - not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own."

in denying their humanity, we betray our own

As a Quaker I cannot allow myself to think of others, no matter how horrible their actions, as beyond inclusion in humanity. I am supposed to answer that of God in each person. George Fox prefaced that mandate by urging that we walk gladly across the earth. It may seem odd to think of walking gladly in the context of discussing the horrible suffering flowing from the disorder and mayhem not only in Darfur, but which has followed the refugees to the camps in Chad, where their existence is marginal, where to wander out of the camp in search of necessities can lead to rape and worse. Yet an essential for human survival is hope, and Herbert's column tells us of indomitable hope, of starving women who would hide crackers in their clothing to take it back to their children in hopes that at least the children might not starve.

Our interconnectedness is not a new idea, rather it is one from which too often we avert our eyes and from which we mentally turn away. We encounter it often in religious literature of many traditions. For me I perhaps first began to grasp it about the time I became aware, through television, that my darker skinned fellow citizens were being oppressed and worse, from watching the unfolding events of the Civil Rights movement at least from Little Rock, when I was 11. It was at that time I first read John Donne's Meditation XVII, with words that are so familiar to many, its text about tolling bells having been used by Hemingway as a title. My mother was the one who pointed me at it in 1957, making sure I read the Latin epigram with which it begins: NUNC LENTO SONITU DICUNT, MORIERIS., which is followed in English by Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die. Most people end with the words about not sending to know for whom the bell tolls, as it tolls for thee. Yet Donne goes further, with strange words about the gift of affliction, and how the affliction of others is a gift to us. Let me offer his final words, which may seem jarring, and even contrary to the thrust of Herbert's column and Wiesel's words, although I think they are not in opposition:

Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell that tells me of his affliction, digs out, and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger, I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.

I do not think one is required to believe in God in the fashion that Donne offers to find a valuable connection in these words. I will take liberty in my interpretation If instead of "God" one thinks of our common humanity, perhaps one may begin to understand how the suffering of others concerns us all, and it is through suffering and overcoming it that ultimately we find a real joy - that we are not alone. That is, no matter how horrible the circumstances in which we might find ourselves, knowing of our common humanity we should not consider ourselves alone, forgotten, as if we did not matter.

And if we wish to have recourse to that, a hope that can sustain and enable us to go on no matter how horrible the circumstances we encounter, we cannot be so solipsistic as to believe our suffering is unique, unmatched by the experiences of others. In that recognition that it is not unique, we can and should open ourselves to the suffering of others. Not only should we not avert our attention therefrom, one might argue we have a responsibility to actively seek it out, to offer comfort and more where possible, and to bear in our heart and our souls what they encounter - com-passion

Here I find a necessary connection with the political. Forgive the apparent transition, but I believe it is a necessary point to make. Not only do I strongly believe as does Wiesel in our responsibility to care about the suffering of others, to offer them a spark of hope to help sustain their own humanity and not deny our own, I believe that requires me - requires us all - to actively oppose any governmental policy that would increase that suffering of anyone. Obviously that means on a moral basis one should never be justifying torture, rationalizing dehumanizing another human being - read again the words of Wiesel with which Herbert ends: in denying their humanity, we betray our own We cannot wait until that point to speak out, to protest, to actively oppose, policies that start us down a slope that can result in such atrocities. Denying food and medicine as a means of attempting to influence the policy of a regime we oppose is in my mind beyond the pale of acceptable behavior. Would that put us in the position of Madeline Albright, in this infamous exchange:

Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price--we think the price is worth it.

We may occasionally have to embrace one evil as lesser than an alternative, but we should never forget it is evil, that suffering will result. Particularly then we must not avert our attention from that suffering.

Even if we lack physical power to intervene, which is often our case as individuals and too frequently the case for nations, we still can offer our witness. WITNESS. If you remember the Peter Weir film starring Harrison Ford, when Det. John Book is about to be taken away by his corrupt captain, the bell is rung, the Amish gather, and while they will not use force as it is against their practice, they stand in silent but powerful witness, and the captain crumbles.

Our witness may not always have that effect. But we cannot witness if we will not pay attention, if we will not respond when someone, perhaps a little boy, rings the bell of alarm.

One other paragraph from Herbert's piece stuck in my mind:

"These are real people with children, with lives that may have been quite simple, but were really rich before they were displaced," said Susannah Sirkin, a deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights.

with lives that may have been quite simple, but were really rich before they were displaced - rich with the very basic human connectedness of family. Having children may be the most basic example of the hope necessary to sustain humanity. Perhaps it is strange that one married for almost a quarter century without children would offer those remarks, but lacking biological children does not mean I lack understanding - we have nieces and nephews, and now two great-nieces. As a teacher I participate in that hope that children represent, that sustains us all in our humanity.

In Herbert you read about the killing of children. That is a killing of hope, and thus a killing of humanity. That is what is to me so horrifying about the exchange between Stahl and Albright, the death of so many children, and the attempt to rationalize it.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

So begins William Blake's "Augeries of Innocence." It is in some ways a troubling poem, interweaving as it does suffering and joy, but such is the human condition. And if we can see the power of understanding the wrongness of human caused suffering of animals, in for example this quatrain:

A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.

how then can we justify silence or turning away from suffering of humans, caused by humans?

Holding On to Our Humanity - we can not do so while denying our humanity, even as the risk of overload. As I would wish for the com-passion of others towards me on those occasions when suffering might be part of my own life - as miniscule as my tribulations may seem in comparison to those of others - how can I deny my com-passion to those in circumstances that trouble them?

Wiesel once told us

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.

He also told us something that I try as much as I can to make part of my expressions here and elsewhere:

Peace is our gift to each other.

To achieve peace we must first be willing to disturb it. That is, we must be willing to jar ourselves and others from complacency, from our all too human tendency to ignore that which we can rationalize as not really affecting us.

I could quote many words from Wiesel and others to attempt to illustrate my belief that we cannot remain silent in the face of suffering.

But you already know that. You know that we have a responsibility to one another. Merely by coming here, a political website, you have stepped beyond your own comfort to engage with others, to risk having your assumptions challenged.

So even as we are challenged, even as we know we will not by ourselves end suffering, by our concern, our com-passion, we make an important difference. In pursuing this path, we move ever closer to the real joy of humanity:

Peace.

Blue Commonwealth - peace

Toasters For Congress: A Video Contest

(VIDEO+PICS) Marching to the White House in Solidarity with Iranians

Holding On to Our Humanity