From The Half-Red House

I just watched a remarkable video about a direct action that is taking place this coming week at Tara, the many-millennia-old site of the castle of the High King of Ireland. Halliburton and its cronies have talked the Irish government into putting a motorway right through the heart of this invaluable world history site. As the child of two archaeologists and nature-lovers, I’m particularly angered by this corporate murder of Gaia and the human memories she shelters. See the video at http://www.livevideo.com/video/1D78F7A1974C4180AC7C538E44A46D27/tara-tara-tara.aspx
and then go there if you can, to stop this madness.

I’m amazed that there are such things as contract archaeological companies that work exclusively for developers interested in meeting the letter (but not the spirit) of the antiquities laws, and I’m also astounded at the way non-English (and non-Gaelic) speaking workers have been imported at great expense to blunt local protest.

My “Thinking Out Loud” co-host Charlotte Crockford just did a warm and informative interview with Hillary Rettig, the Author of a Book called “The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way” . The interview took an unexpected and helpful turn when Charlotte asked Rettig about her vegetarian activism. I’ll be posting the program, including the interview, as a podcast at the Thinking Out Loud Podcast site , and I encourage you to listen and/or check the book out of your local library. Rettig emphasizes the necessity to recognize the realistic fears that activists and creative people have as they move into a new venture, and provides ways to move forward with eyes wide open. 

Dennis Kucinich won an online straw poll at ABC News after the latest debate. I voted and asked a few other people to vote. Once you had voted, your IP address could not vote again. This is not a true random poll of viewers, but it was a good measure of activist support for the candidates and a feather in the cap of the winner. I checked back a few times on Sunday and Monday to see how the votes were adding up and saw Dennis’s total slowly climibing and passing that of Barack Obama. Apparently last night, abc posted a new poll with NO Kucinich votes shown and this morning they have a commentary that talks about Clinton’s disappointment at not beating Obama and mentions nothing of Kucinich. I honestly think Kucinich won the debate fair and square, even though he was called on less often than the other candidates. For a major media corporation to behave this way confirms my most paranoid views of the power structure.
see http://blog.myspace.com/kucinich2008 for further discussion.

There was a Democratic candidate debate on ABC today, and, as usual, I think Dennis Kucinich won handily, while “front-runners” Clinton and Obama struggled to reply consistently to questions on Iraq and Trade especially. Richardson stood out as the one candidate who proposed scrapping the  “No Child Left Behind” law entirely, saying it hadn’t worked. Dennis side-stepped that issue by calling for money now spent in military aggression to be applied to actually improving schools; he even mentioned Piaget by name! Edwards called for paying teachers what their work is really worth, placing it on a par with the work of engineers.

At this point I have to confess that I was working on spreadsheets and listening to the TV sound with one ear, so I probably missed a great deal of nuance.

One question stood out for me. A listener asked whether the candidates believed that a “personal God” might have prevented or mitigated the New Orleans levy failures or the Minnesota bridge collapse as a result of prayer. I would have agreed with the atheists who have been suggesting this question for a long time, that the candidates, who are all professing Christians, would fall back on vague platitudes rather than answer “Yes” or “No” to this question. Most of the candidates did as I expected, but some evaded in more honest open-hearted ways than expected. Mike Gravel just answered that what we need is not more prayer but more love in society as a whole. Most said that they were Christians and believed in  and practised prayer. Edwards and Biden spoke of their reactions to the death of their loved ones, and the way prayer helped them continue their life journeys in spite of grief and shock (prayer as an internal support rather than an external tool). At least one candidate emphasised that he would not force his beliefs down people’s throats if elected.

The question set me off on a round of introspection that meant I missed many details of the candidates’ responses. I assume that a Republican field of candidates would all simply answer “Yes” to the question, without fear that any large part of their electorate would be upset. For Democrats, the question is a very dangerous one, since the Democratic Party is not theologically united, and any strong answer could cost votes.

First of all, the question was more about divine intercession than about prayer per se. What do I think prayer does in the world? I thought back to the work of the theologian Walter Wink, who emphasises that it is God (or the Spirit) that initiates prayer, and not human beings. He characterizes prayer as the  “groaning” of the Spirit which, when expressed by many human minds and voices, can guide and change history. I think the keyword here is history, the collective destiny of a large body of human beings or all of humanity, rather than the local course of events. In this way of looking at the world, God is a kind of prisoner of humanity, and a kind of democracy prevails, since only those human beings who choose to express their revulsion at the suffering in the world and their hopes for compassion (or, I suppose their contempt for victims and desire for an unequal share of life’s benefits), are voters, and God is duty-bound to steer the course of history with compassion only when She gets enough affirmative votes. In this scenario, both the prayers and the good deeds of individuals count as votes for the good (and I suppose the evil deeds and curses count as votes for the continuation  of suffering). It is quite a different thing to claim that a benevolent deity can bend history ever-so-slightly toward a good and fair outcome than to claim that God can override the laws of physics and overcome the workings of human politics on an ad-hoc basis when prompted to do so by a believer.

Most of the time I side with materialists and atheists in saying that the laws of physics, chemistry and biology rule the world, and that compassionate, and intelligent, foresighted and concrete action by human beings is the only thing that can mitigate  their predictable effects on human beings. This is a good working hypothesis and explains what happens most of the time. The bridge builders did not evaluate the design well enough before putting it into concrete form; the bridge inspectors were not well enough paid or well-enough motivated to detect the flaws in time, greed and expediency demanded that the bridge be kept open to transport goods even when there were doubts about safety, commuters had no practical alternative to driving across the river because of public policy decisions… things like this will be found to fully explain the bridge collapse, and even the date and death-toll of the collapse.

I agree that my prayers for the safety  and well-being of myself, my friends and my family do not bring about those things more often than chance. To think so is superstition. Still. I instinctively pray those prayers; maybe it’s a part of the laws of biology, as applied to human beings,  that they will tend to do so; the other name for this kind of prayer is worry.

 Where I tend to differ, however slightly, from the materialist point of view is in holding out the possibility that my calmly and deliberately structured compassionate wishes (I call some of them prayers) tend to join with those of others and tend in a particular direction that I think of as Good. Combined with persistent actions on the part of a lot of people, they do determine the long-term course of history, the shape of the world my grandchildren (or grand nephews and nieces etc.) will inhabit. I envision a world where human beings live more harmoniously and sustainably within the limits imposed by the laws of physics, chemistry and biology.

When the New Testament urges us to pray for our “leaders” and for those who persecute us, I feel it is expressing the paradoxical truth that good wishes, positive prayers sent in any direction further the good that we all know needs to be done.

Lying next to my cat the other day, watching his little lungs moving in and out, I became deeply aware that I am an Earthling and and Animal along with him. Many mystics say that human beings differ from “lower” animals in having indivivdual souls, while cats and mosquitos have group souls. Maybe prayer is a compensatory action to bring human beings collectively into the communion that cats naturally share with all other cats.

How did I get here from presidential politcs anyway?!

If you live in Britain, you are probably inundated by coverage of the Climate Action week protests now happening near Heathrow airport and elsewhere in the island nation. If you don’t, you may not even have heard them mentioned. The Guardian Newspaper is a good place to start reading about it. Yesterday, there were seminars and concerts at the site near the airport and preparations for actions at BAA headquarters in London, in Scotland and elsewhere. The latest is that six people have been injured and three arrested as police attacked the crowd of about 1500 protesters who were carrying a banner that read “We are Armed… Only with Peer-Reviewed Science”. Shades of  the recent unprovoked police attacks on peaceful demonstrators in North Providence, Rhode Island.  Please pay attention, folks!

“In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation… even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.”

- Great Law of the Iroquois

A peaceful protest march and rally at a North Providence restaurant that allegedly buys from a sweatshop operation in New York where workers put in 110-hour weeks for as little as $4.40 an hour, was attacked by North Providence, RI, police yesterday.  The attack resulted in serious injury to one protester and arrests of others.

The story at the Providence Journal   is available for a limited time. and you can go to the IWW website for the word from the point of view of union members who were there. There is a VERY REVEALING  gallery of pictures  available too. A young woman was injured, having her leg broken and losing blood.

People who work under slave-labor conditions can’t make their case to the public and rely on groups like unions and student activist groups to do so. The only way to bring these conditions to the attention of authorities and people who can make them stop is to put pressure on the consumers of the goods and services the sweatshop workers produce, and the most efffective pressure comes in the form of loud, creative and visible protest. Taking to the streets is the classic way to do this.

Whatever traffic violations may have inadvertently happened, there is no excuse for the police to use bodily force, pepper spray, arrests and handcuffs. Jaywalking, for that is the name usually given to the inappropriate presence of pedestrians in vehicle lanes of streets, is usually punished with a ticket. If you look at the pictures, I think you will agree that the march was spirited but completely nonviolent, and that traffic laws were violated only inadvertently.

I urge anyone reading this to go to the IWW site for the addresses of the authorities in North Providence and to write them, asking that charges be dropped and that police conduct be investigated. There is also a need for bail money and help with hospital bills for the uninsured injured young woman.

I want to thank my MySpace friend, British poet Lucy Lepchani, for pointing out that there is a protest/music festival planned “somewhere near Heathrow Airport” this week, aimed at calling for a decrease in carbon-emitting air travel and a bolstering of Britain’s rail system, to more efficiently transport food, products and people. Here are some recent links:
Camp Climate Action Website
BBC
LOCAL LONDON

The government has proposed (and is going ahead with) using a draconian anti-terrorist law on the protestors/festival-goers near Heathrow. People are being asked to write their MPs to stop the application of these laws to peaceful protesters. Some are seeing the trend to demonize protest as a form of terrorism as a threat to end free speech rights for good. Interestingly, even some commentators on this side of the Atlantic are worried.

Most of the opposition to the Climate Action gathering cite the need to keep the tourists and business travellers flowing steadily at Heathrow (in much the same way that objections to the anti-sweatshop march in North Providence yesterday focus on the need to keep cars moving down the street without any delays). When government steps in to support the status quo of high-carbon-emitting transport and supresses it shows where its true priorities lie.

Here is the rationale for the Camp from the website:

Aviation is the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, and all our efforts to tackle climate change in other sectors are undone by the massive growth in air travel. Holding the camp at Heathrow aims to highlight the lunacy of the government’s airport expansion plans, target industry giants profiteering from the climate crisis, and raise awareness of the need to fly less. The camp will also support local residents in their long-term struggle against the building of a third runway and the destruction of their communities.

There will be a day of mass direct action aiming to disrupt the activities of the airport and the aviation industry, but in the interests of public safety there will be no attempt to blockade runways.

Although the location is different, the philosophy of the camp remains the same: to be a place for the burgeoning network of people taking radical action on climate change around the country to come together for a week of low-impact living, education, debate, networking, strategising, celebration, and direct action. The camp will feature over 100 workshops covering topics such as climate change impacts, carbon offsetting, biofuels, peak oil, permaculture, practical renewables, campaign strategy, skills for direct action, and much more. Run without leaders by everyone who comes along, it will be a working ecological village using renewable energy, composting waste and sourcing food locally.

It all comes down to us, now. We are the last generation that can do anything about climate change. In 20 or 30 years’ time, should we not change our ways, we’ll be committed to emissions increases that will see forests burn, soils decay, oceans rise, and millions of people die. If we don’t get this issue right, so much else is lost too.

We still have time, but not for long. Make it count.

Listen to Seize the Day‘s “Flying”, for even more on the subject. Also reading George Monbiot is enlightening.

Here in the US, we are not hearing about this new surge of activism on the part of the British public in favor of real measures to solve Earth’s most serious problem.

And perhaps more importantly, we are not hearing about what seems to be a trend over there to combine the arts and music creatively and organically with civil disobedience and protest. For example, we have heard virtually nothing about the annual gatherings of artists musicians and activists to shut down the nuclear depot at Faslane. There are necessary changes in the way the world runs that simply can’t be made by isolated individuals. These changes require cooperation and solidarity… these include stopping the human-caused acceleration of global warming and ending war as a policy instrument before it wipes us out.

The festival of peace planned for August 25 at Kennebunkport, Maine, partially described in this announcement from New Hampshire Peace Action, has potential to bring this trend across the Atlantic. It involves people camping out in several fields, named for fallen Iraq War soldiers, and participating in a variety of political and cultural events:

The description of an Austin, TX event in this podcast from the Grassroots Radio Conference offers another vision of such a movement melding art and protest.