Do not lose heart

From “Do Not Lose Heart” by Clarissa Pinkola-Estes, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts, adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take "everyone on Earth" to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these - to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both, are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

Mel Gibson thumbs up on Michael Moore

(from a NY Times article on the People's Choice Awards show)

"I feel a strange kinship with Michael [Moore]," Mr. Gibson said."They're trying to pit us against each other in the press, but it's a hologram. They really have got nothing to do with one another. It's just some kind of device, some left-right. He makes some salient points. There was some very expert, elliptical editing going on. However, what the hell are we doing in Iraq? No one can explain to me in a reasonable manner that I can accept why we're there, why we went there, and why we're still there."

What Happened in Ohio (washingtonpost.com)

excerpts from the article:

[Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, held hearings on the matter of the Ohio election and has just released on Wednesday, Jan 5 a 100-page report, "Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio" .]

So what am I to think about all the allegations I've been reading in the noncertified press since November? That the left-wing bloggers are blowing things out of proportion? That the mainstream press is being properly circumspect? That nothing much happened in Ohio? "Preserving Democracy" belies such a benign conclusion. Listen:

"We have found numerous, serious election irregularities . . . which resulted in a significant disenfranchisement of voters. . . .

In many cases these irregularities were caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio."

Presumably Conyers is being careful not to draw conclusions because he wants Congress to have a look. But we're talking about a Congress whose members often pass important legislation without bothering to read it. What makes him think anyone is going to read his report unless he waves it about like a smoking gun? -- snip --

Well, I don't want to overturn the election, either. But I would like to know if public officials and private citizens engaged in a significant and concerted effort to steal the election in the event the wrong person seemed to be winning it. And if so, I'd like to know who the miscreants were, what they did and what heads are going to roll.

What Happened in Ohio (washingtonpost.com)

US marines undertake "gut-wrenching" clean up in Sri Lanka (Yahoo! News)

excerpts from article...

GINTOTA, Sri Lanka (AFP) - Despite their training and combat experience, the US marines working in tsunami-hit Sri Lanka admit that picking through the shattered remains of peoples' lives has been a heart-rending exercise. --snip--

"There was rubble everywhere. It was like the Twin Towers," in New York destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks says Private First Class Damon Carr, describing the scene when he arrived.

"I didn't know where we were going to start from; everywhere you looked, there was rubble."

He found a photo album with a family snap of half a dozen people and says he handed it back to the mother pictured in it. She was the only one still alive.

"I almost cried," he says. "We're marines, we've been trained, but I never thought I'd be standing here, picking up the pieces of someone's whole life." -- snip --

Amid the mess, the occasional piece of torn cloth -- perhaps once someone's dress -- and pieces of household items still peak through.

Hospital Corpsman First Class Tim Dittlinger, who normally provides medical care to the marines from the 9th Engineers Support Battalion here, scrunches up a piece of material and tosses it into the bulldozer's jaws as he admits it's been tough.

"It's been heartbreaking and gut-wrenching. It's hard to come here and do what we've been doing, dumping what people have built up their whole lives," he says.
"Picking up people's lives, it's not what we've been expecting to do."

Yahoo! News - US marines undertake "gut-wrenching" clean up in Sri Lanka

World responds to Aceh's pain (The Jakarta Post)

excerpts from article:

"The catastrophic Asian tsunami has not merely destroyed countless cities and villages and killed over one hundred and fifty thousand people, but has also stimulated a genuine spontaneous desire among people to help. Such a spontaneous willingness to help the victims can be seen in many cities worldwide. The international community has given its full attention and shown a universal will to overcome this disaster. It is such a candle in the dark. --snip--

"There are many people; ordinary people, big and small companies who are willing to help. One student studying at the Islamic University of Indonesia in Makassar city told of a beggar who gave his daily earnings to the student to be delivered to the affected people. -- snip--

"Aceh, the province at the tip of Sumatra Island has suffered the most in the Asian tsunami with an estimated 100,000 fatalities. -- snip--

"Therefore, the pain of the Acehnese people is the pain of Indonesians as well. So far, Aceh is still under civil emergency rule, and the role of the Indonesian Military is very strong in this area. Thousands of Acehnese have died in the conflict between the Indonesian Military and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). -- snip--

"...the long suffering of Aceh, not just due to this natural disaster, but also the chronic political conflict, is another reason why many Indonesian people feel great empathy for Aceh.... The Indonesian government must learn from the disaster and from the genuine concern of the ordinary people to better serve their people.

"In the context of Aceh, it is urgent to continue efforts for conflict resolution and peace building. Many Indonesian NGOs concerned with human rights issues are asking the government to acknowledge that the separatist movement in Aceh is the result of economic and political injustice. Many Indonesian NGOs also maintain that it would be hypocritical for the government to allow international involvement to provide aid for Aceh after the tsunami but prevent international involvement in conflict resolution and peace building in the province.

"Hopefully, this natural disaster will be a blessing in disguise in the form of a genuine desire from the Indonesian government and the GAM to resume dialog. Besides emergency aid due to the natural disaster, it is apparent that the primary needs of the ordinary people in Aceh now and in the future are peace and prosperity. Conflict, violence and corruption will only prolong their pain."

The Jakarta Post - World responds to Aceh's pain

... then it's the tsunami that will bring us together ...

Suddenly, we are simply humans again.

Watching footage of the massive wave, the unfathomable devastation, and the largest relief efforts ever mounted ... all at once, political battles seem a pale use of energy.

Earth took the upper hand here.

On the radio yesterday played one of my favorite Smiths songs: "If it's not love, then it's the bomb that will bring us together." Earth's "bomb" will do.

There is no political orientation to this suffering. No one to blame. We come together to relieve the suffering of human beings. There's a hushed purity to it.

We can see the effect: Corporations are competing to out-give each other. The combined $54 million in corporate gifts eclipsed the $35 million first amount promised by the US government (since upped to $350 million). Now governments too are competing to top each other. As UN humanitarian chief Jan Egeland said, "I'd rather see competitve compassion, than no compassion." To me, this is a great sign -- the first humanitarian arms race! We need to celebrate this.

Private giving has reached $200 million. Before our eyes, the Internet has metamorphosed into a powerful tool to organize compassion. Levels of individual donations have been unprecedented for an international disaster. One example, according to the Christian Science Monitor, the charitable Catholic Relief Services (CRS) generally collects about $700,000 in disaster aid each year. Over the last week, CRS tallied more than $9.1 million.

The Monitor suggests that this heralds fundamental changes in the culture of giving, both in the US and worldwide.

More signs of shift: Military POW/MIA forensic supplies & expertise are being used to help locate and identify tsunami victims. Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln constructed a potable water manifold in 8 hours and are filling thousands of water jugs to be flown on Navy helicopters to isolated regions in Sumatra.

Christians and Jews are helping Muslims and Hindus and Buddists because they're humans and they need help. Hey, there's a concept.

Even impoverished North Korea has chipped in with a pledge of $150,000. (Guess that would make them not so evil.) Convicts in Malaysia are donating money earned doing prison work. War-torn Afghanistan plans to send doctors.

And the rich guys -- the so-called Group of 8 big industrial nations -- following Canada's lead last week, look like they're about to agree to freeze debt repayments or write off the debts for the affected countries. Hey, there's another concept.

So it can be in all things.

Look what we can do when we need to -- when we choose to.

It has all made clear to me that peace itself -- and the work to build it -- is and should be a non-partisan issue. That, from now on, is my stand, my assumption. My operating principle.


NB: If you're becoming bewildered trying to decide where to donate the money you earn doing prison work ... the best site I've seen is Network for Good. They describe all the various efforts complete with thorough backgrounds on the charitable organizations involved.

Congresswoman meeting update

Just talked today with my congresswoman's scheduler and found that my representative, Diane Watson, will be touring southeast Asia to survey the extent of damage due to the tsunami, so appointments are on hold till February. I'll contact her office again in early Feb.

Leave No Sales Pitch Behind (New York Times Editorial)

I expect moms will soon be screaming at their congresspeople.

Bush's Orwellian double-speak No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to provide names, addresses and phone numbers of students to military recruiters or risk losing federal aid. Yeah, this is a positive message to be sending kids -- strong arm the education system to cough up contact info so we can hoodwink more poor kids to kill for us. All of this, as the article says, in a law invoked in the name of children -- God forbid.

excerpt: "military recruiters can blitz youngsters with uninvited phone calls to their homes and on-campus pitches replete with video war games."


The New York Times > Opinion > Editorial: Leave No Sales Pitch Behind

Courage

"Courage is only an accumulation of small steps." -- George Konrad

Many New or Expectant Mothers Die Violent Deaths (washingtonpost.com)

Yahoo! News - Many New or Expectant Mothers Die Violent Deaths

I have been befuddled for a year by the extrodinary amount of attention paid by the country and the media to the Peterson case. What could we possibly be so fascinated by here?

Ah, the answer comes today with this report, first of three, by the Washington Post. As it turns out, the killing of a pregnant woman is FAR more frequent in our very own country that we'd expect. The statistics are astonishing and virtually unreported. We needed the facination with this case to prompt some smart reporters to go see if this is a trend. As it turns out, no reliable system exists to track such cases.

excerpt:
"It's very hard to connect the dots when you don't even see the dots," said Elaine Alpert, a public health expert at Boston University. "It's only just starting to be recognized that there is a trend or any commonalities between these deaths." -snip

Five years ago in Maryland, state health researchers Isabelle Horon and Diana Cheng set out to study maternal deaths, using sophisticated methods to spot dozens of overlooked cases in their state. They assumed they would find more deaths from medical complications than the state's statistics showed. The last thing they expected was murder.

But in their study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2001, they wrote that in Maryland, "a pregnant or recently pregnant woman is more likely to be a victim of homicide than to die of any other cause."

"It was a huge surprise," said Horon, who recalls paperwork covering the researchers' kitchen tables on weekends and evenings as they sought to understand the astonishing numbers. "We thought we had to have made a mistake. We kept checking and checking and rechecking."

Their findings, as it turned out, were no error. Homicide accounted for 50 of 247 maternal deaths in Maryland over a six-year period -- more than 20 percent. It had caused more deaths than cardiovascular disorders, embolisms or accidents.

"People have this misconception that pregnancy is a safe haven," Cheng said. -snip-

Three weeks after Peterson disappeared in Modesto, Quinnisha Thomas lost her life in Sacramento, 80 miles away. Eight months pregnant, Thomas, 18, was walking home from a grocery store when her ex-boyfriend shot her in the head execution-style because, prosecutors said, he believed fatherhood would get in the way of his music career. "This was a big, major inconvenience for him," prosecutor Mark Curry said.

Other states that say they have no way of counting pregnant and postpartum homicides include Arizona, where Melinda Gonzalez, 20, was found dead in a park when she was three months pregnant; and Pennsylvania, where Christina Colon, 24, five months pregnant, was shot and found dead in a quarry. -snip-

Jacquelyn Campbell of Johns Hopkins University said the number of cases has surprised her, even after her many years of research on women's homicides. Although she knew of pregnant homicide victims, she said, "I thought it was a tragedy. I didn't think it was a trend."

Now, she has come to believe: "It's a phenomenon. It probably was always there, but we just didn't know."

The homicides documented by The Post happened in small mountain towns, in tough urban neighborhoods, in quiet suburban subdivisions. The women who died included a college student, a popular waitress, an actress, a church volunteer, a mother of three, a Navy petty officer, an immigrant housekeeper, a businesswoman, a high school athlete, an Army captain, a minister's wife, a Head Start teacher.

More than 100 were teenagers, barely beyond their own girlhoods. -snip-

One recent year of homicides -- 2002 -- was examined in greater detail to get a closer look at how and why the cases happened. For a group of 72 homicides in 24 states, The Post interviewed family members, friends, prosecutors and police. The analysis showed that nearly two-thirds of the cases had a strong relation to pregnancy or involved a domestic-violence clash in which pregnancy may have been a factor.

The dead included Ceeatta Stewart-McKinnie, 23, a college student in Richmond who was beaten to death by her boyfriend. The couple had dated on and off for years, and she had had abortions previously, prosecutors said. This time, he was married -- and she refused to end her pregnancy. Turkey hunters found her bludgeoned body in the woods.

In Chicago, Chavanna Prather, 17, was a high school student who played basketball and worked part time at McDonald's. Prather became intimate with her manager at work, then became pregnant and asked for money for an abortion, police said. She was found dead in a river on the city's South Side. He awaits trial.

In Rochester, N.Y., Zaneta Browne, 29, was at odds with her married boyfriend about her pregnancy in 2002 when he shot her with a .22-caliber rifle. The killer and his wife secretly buried her on rural land, hoping no one would find out. Browne left three children behind. She was nearly four months pregnant with twins.

Louis R. Mizell, who heads a firm that tracks incidents of crime and terrorism, observed that "when husbands or boyfriends attack pregnant partners, it usually has to do with an unwillingness to deal with fatherhood, marriage, child support or public scandal." -snip-

At any age, "pregnancy is a huge, life-altering event for both the male and the female," said Pat Brown, a criminal profiler based in Minneapolis. "It is certainly a more dangerous moment in life. You are escalating people's responsibilities and curtailing their freedoms."

For some men, she said, the situation boils down to one set of unadorned facts: "If the woman doesn't want the baby, she can get an abortion. If the guy doesn't want it, he can't do a damn thing about it. He is stuck with a child for the rest of his life, he is stuck with child support for the rest of his life, and he's stuck with that woman for the rest of his life. If she goes away, the problem goes away."

Dept. of Peace & Representative meetings in Jan

I am close to setting a date to meet with my Congresswoman, and I anticipate, several other Representatives at the end of Jan next year. These will be meetings to discuss the Department of Peace -- a bill introduced by Dennis Kucinich with a growing number of co-sponsors. More information about this powerful legislation can be found at the Department of Peace Campaign. Some highlights include:

• Hold peace as an organizing principle in our society;
  
• Endeavor to promote justice and democratic principles to expand human rights;
  
• Strengthen non-military means of peacemaking;
  
• Work to create peace, prevent violence, divert from armed conflict, use field-tested programs, and develop new structures in non-violent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict;
  
• Address matters both domestic and international in scope;
  
• Submit to the President recommendations for reductions in weapons of mass destruction, and make annual reports to the President on the sale of arms from the United States to other nations, with analysis of the impact of such sales on the defense of the United States and how such sales affect peace;
  
• Encourage the development of initiatives from local communities, religious groups, and nongovernmental organizations;
  
• Facilitate the development of peace summits at which parties to a conflict may gather under carefully prepared conditions to promote non-violent communication and mutually beneficial solutions;
  
• Develop new programs that relate to the societal challenges of school violence, guns, racial or ethnic violence, violence against gays and lesbians, and police-community relations disputes.
  

If there is any legislation that would be worth even a lifetime of effort to become law, this would be it. It would create a powerful counterbalancing momentum away from the war belief we hold currently: that war / violence is inevitable and therefore acceptable.

I wrote an article about the rationale for the Department of Peace. I'll post it soon.

This legislation would collect under one umbrella several scattered domestic and international programs that are designed to reduce violence. As the Department of Homeland Security argued for the value of centralizing departments to improve coordination and communication, so too, the Department of Peace would improve coordination and communication among these existing programs.

It would also appropriately fund exceedingly effective field-tested programs that have been shown to have strong measurable impact at reducing violence in schools, prisons, and local communities.

People who are skeptical about peace challenge me -- peace means doing nothing. On the contrary, "peacework" is hard work -- doing the work that promotes connection, self-worth, community and effectively teaches the skills -- and they are skills -- so that peace-based ways of resolving conflict become second-nature. The programs that the Department of Peace would fund show us time and again that once learned, these skills are transformational and they WORK.

Impressions from outside

Friends of mine recently returned from attending a family wedding in Argentina. The Ukraine protests of the elections were in full swing. "Why isn't this happening in your country?" they were repeatedly asked. "Why aren't there thousands in the streets protesting -- the exit polls were so different from the results, surely you suspect foul play." My friends didn't have an answer. "Ah," the taxi driver lamented, "You Americans are so rich you don't care. Even the poor people are fat in your country."

Updates on peace work

Reinvigorating myself by looking at fallujahinpictures.com blog. Shows you what one person, working part time, can do.

This blog will be an account of the work I'm doing to implement the mission of Imagine Festival. Imagine Festival is a music and workshops festival that is to tour around the country at university areas to start with, plus an anchor performance / workshop / retail / cafe space in Los Angeles. Its mission is to get people together to imagine what the world is like at peace, then take the steps we need to get there. I've been working on it for almost three years now.

It struck me on election night, as the results poured in and I got a call from my repub friend who was still my friend after 2 years of arguments, that the election was a huge fight over who gets to hold the steering wheel, when no one has really articulated where we're actually trying to go.

"We must go right! No! We need to go left!... Wait, where are we going?"

That's what I intend to help create with Imagine Festival... an idea of where we're trying to get to. I have an instinct that we really have a lot more ideas in common around that than we realize.

I have another instinct that the road to get there won't be the paved one going left or the paved one going right, but the unpaved road hidden right before us at this hostile-looking T junction. There is a road there... we just can't see it yet.

Part of the work of Imagine Festival is to create visible, vibrant networks of people actually doing the work to make peace an operating principle in our society. There are a lot of incredibly successful programs out there already, they just don't make the news and they're not adopted into our ways we teach our children. That can change.

This next month, I'm going to organize a group meeting with my congresswoman to discuss with her the creation of a Department of Peace -- a bill that will be dropped soon by Dennis Kucinich. This department will be a major step forward for this nation. More about the Department of Peace to come. You can find out more at www.dopcampaign.org in the meantime. Check back soon!