Change For a Dollar

Is he asking for Change, or is he asking for CHANGE?
Follow a man as he affects multiple peoples' lives with just one dollar, proving that it doesn't take much to be the change in someone's life.

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Hope Knows an Injustice Visited on our Neighbor is an Injustice Visited on Us All.

In Pakistan, civilians have no choice but to cope with a drone war that has turned merciless, as  unprecedented’ drone assaults - 58 Strikes in 102 days - continues on without an official figure of how many civilians have died as a result of the unmanned missile strikes.  Strikes, which President Obama has more than doubled since the remote attacks started, despite the United Nation's urging to rein in , the "once-limited, once-covert program to off senior terrorist leaders that has morphed into a full-scale — if undeclared — war in Pakistan".

So, now, that we can do war by remote control, it's easy for us, as Americans, nestled in our mostly taken-for-granted creature comforts, to keep a positive attitude and pretend that that is enough to save our country...the world from those who want to take it over with no thought for anyone but  themselves.  It's not enough.

However, thankfully, there are brave people who realize that something must be done.  One of those people is Chris Hedges, who demonstrated the courage to “speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, to vindicate the rights of all who are left desolate,” and who consequently, was arrested yesterday, along with 130 other people, including Daniel Ellsberg, at the Veterans for Peace White House Civil Disobedience to End War event.

In the video below, Hedges gives a speech on how to keep hope alive, and it will not be kept alive, in his words, by "trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama".



Chis Hedges' speech:

"Hope, from now on, will look like this.

Hope is not trusting in the ultimate goodness of Barack Obama, who, like Herod of old, sold out his people. It will not be realized by chanting packaged campaign slogans or attempting to influence the democratic party.  It will not come through our bankrupt liberal institutions, from the press, nor from the withered stump that is the labor movement.

Hope will only come now when we physically defy the violence of the state.  All who resist. All who are here today keep hope alive.  All who succumb to fear, despair, and apathy become an enemy of hope.  They become in their passivity, agents of injustice. If the enemies of hope are finally victorious, the poison of violence will become not only the language of power but the language of opposition. And those who resist with nonviolence are in times like these the thin line of defense between a civil society and its disintegration.

Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. It is not about the right attitude or peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. The more futile, the more useless, the more irrelevant and incomprehensible an act of rebellion is, the vaster and the more potent hope becomes. Hope never makes sense. Hope is weak, unorganized and absurd. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope posits that people are drawn to the good by the good. This is the secret of hope’s power and it is why it can never finally be defeated. Hope demands for others what we demand for ourselves. Hope does not separate us from them. Hope sees in our enemy our own face.

Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey.

The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. The powerful protect their own. They divide the world into the damned and the blessed, the patriots and the enemy, the rich and the poor. They insist that extinguishing lives in foreign wars or in our prison complexes is a form of human progress. They cannot see that the suffering of a child in Kandahar or a child in the blighted urban pocket of our nation's capitol diminishes and impoverishes us all. They are deaf, dumb and blind to hope. Those addicted to power, enthralled by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. And this is because they kneel before the idols of greed and money.

If we resist, and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. If all we accomplish today is to assure a grieving mother in Baghdad or Afghanistan, a young man or woman crippled physically and emotionally by the hammer blows of war that he or she is not alone, our act will be successful, but hope cannot be sustained if it cannot be seen. Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed, and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

Defenseless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

Links:

Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) - Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict works on behalf of war victims by advocating that warring parties recognize and help the civilians they harm. CIVIC supports the principle that it is never acceptable for a warring party to ignore civilian suffering.

In 2005, CIVIC’s founder Marla Ruzicka was killed in Iraq by a suicide bomb while advocating for families of victims. CIVIC honors her legacy and strives to sustain her vision.

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In a Dark Time...The Eye Begins To See.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks-is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened. summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

-- Theodore Roethke

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Unconditional Life: Learning From the Heart

In the midst of hopelessness, where life is approximately 400 years behind the United States (ironically, Haiti was the first nation to emulate the United States in 1804 when they broke away from France and tried their hand at democracy), and people suffer from the worst kind of poverty, it's unthinkable that more tragedy could possibly inflict itself on a nation, who, if anything, deserves relief from their dire conditions.

Unbelievable, as it may seem to many of us, the Haitians make up for what they do not have in material goods and fundamental staples, by retaining their faith and spiritual connections. Despite that faith, their hard work, immense suffering, and their efforts to try and take care of one another, something always interferes and sets them back even further.

Back in 2004, that something was Hurricane Jeanne, which left 1,500 dead. In an article, Facing Haiti's Hopelessness, She Helps, Ernest Cooper of the St. Petersburg Times, highlights the missions of one surgeon, Sylvia Campbell, who said at the time, "It's so much sadder than it was before. The Haitians are so much poorer, so much hungrier," and that she is "awed by the Haitian struggle -- and their unyielding humanity". One example amongst so many is when neighbors walked five hours with one woman who need emergency surgery.

"They're such gentle kind people. It's so horrible that they have to go through more tragedy. You wonder how could people survive, yet they have incredible faith, an incredible gentleness to their spirit." -- Sylvia Campbell

Today, once again, it's so much sadder than it was before. Yet, there is no doubt the Haitians will continue to go on, living and loving. These afflicted people exemplify what Dr. Dan Gottleib, host of Voices in the Family on NPR means when he talks about the "gift of hopelessness" in his book, Learning From the Heart

Dr. Gottlieb has experienced his fair share of tragedy. At age 33-years old, he suffered through a car accident that left him a quadriplegic. A couple of years after the accident, he came to a deliberate crossroads in his life. This was the point at which he decided he was going to choose life or death. Taking himself off to his bedroom where he could be alone, he confronted something...a spiritual being, an image of God, the "heart" as he refers to in his book; he's not sure what or who it was that responded to him, only that something did.

At first Dr. Gottlieb said, "OK, I'll live with this if you can give me hope that one day I will walk again."

The voice responded, "No hope...live or die, choose one."

He tried again and said, "OK, give me hope that I will not continue to be as sick as I have been over the past couple of years."

The being responded exactly the same way, "No hope...live or die, choose one."

Everything Dr. Gottlieb asked for received the same response, and so he chose life, unconditionally, the way life was right at that moment. Today, he has a thriving practice, authored several books and hosts a radio show, but that did not come easily or without more heartache, as he lost his sister and then his wife to divorce and shortly thereafter, to death.

Semantically, faith and hope are very similar, except the word hope places more conditions, and is more specific, whereas faith is more general -- confidently believing in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of something or someone, whether it is life in general, a person, an idea, God, etc.

But placing conditions on love and life automatically limits our potential, eliminates freedom, and guarantees failure because there is no doubt that someone, something, or life in general will not measure up to the terms we've imposed. We can't escape it...life, and/or the people in our life will hurt, betray, and disappoint us repeatedly. Does that mean we should give up? Stop loving? Stop living? The easy answer is yes. However, keep in mind that we have, and we will hurt, betray, and disappoint in life and love as much as life hurts, betrays, and disappoints us.

Instead of abandoning hope altogether, Dr. Gottlieb said he can live with the definition of hope Jerome Groopman the author of "Anatomy of Hope" gives, "the belief that tomorrow can be better than today".

The Haitians who live in the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, in circumstances, incomprehensible to most of us, without an education, have learned from the heart. They know that to give up, is to have given up on the only reason for our existence...to contribute to life, that is, to live, and love. Each time we stop loving someone or choose against life, we truly fail, as we have refused to fulfill the one and only reason we exist. It is as simple as that.

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Does the Religious Conservative Willfully Misrepresent Jesus?

Most religious conservatives probably do not willfully misrepresent Jesus; rather they are on auto pilot, afraid to think beyond what they've been taught, even when the object of their worship clearly states the exact opposite in His teachings. Religious conservatives' beliefs are based in and defined by fear of what they have to lose by opening up their minds to what Jesus has to say, and they're right to be afraid. Jesus doesn't mince words when it comes to the almighty dollar.

His main message threatens all of us because He is very clear as to how He feels about money. Some of us, like me, admit we know what Jesus is talking about but rather than follow Jesus the way he instructed us too, we feel the guilt and/or rationalize that we are following Him when we shove a $1 into the poor box.

On the other hand, religious conservatives resort to the Old Testament, searching out any Biblical verse that will set them free from Jesus' instructions. Not only that, they will turn around and preach chapter and verse on what they've found and try to convince others that this is what Jesus wanted, condemning anyone who does not conform and usually those non conformers are practicing what Jesus taught in some form.

As Peter Gomes points out in his book, Jesus’ parables all point to a standard that has not yet become the norm, and appeal to a moral reality that has not yet become the cultural social or political consensus. He is very consistent about this. Jesus preaches about a new truth which he calls the “good news” or gospel. He is not encouraging us to hold on to the "truths" of old; He is describing a truth He wants us to seek out.

Yet, the word conservative means to preserve existing conditions, to limit change as much as possible...the exact opposite of what Jesus is all about. Jesus indicts contemporary culture encouraging radical change and challenges the status quo. He hangs out with the wrong people, antagonizes the establishment and resists anyone who attempts to tame his message. Jesus is anything but conservative and ironically succumbs to a fate avidly promoted by so many of those who now worship Him.

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Time to Get Over 9/11

NY Times Op-Ed columnist Tom Friedman thinks 9/11 has made us stupid.

"I honor, and weep for, all those murdered on that day. But our reaction to 9/11 — mine included — has knocked America completely out of balance, and it is time to get things right again."

He doesn't want to forget those who died that terrible day but he wants America to stop living in the shadow of 9/11 and start to embrace what America stands for, hope for the future, "where anything is possible for anyone".

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