Metta’s Opinion

“Self-control, fearlessness and independence of thinking, these are the three tests of education. Only that country is educated where these three qualities find expression.” –Vinoba Bhave

This is a letter landed in many of our inboxes this morning. The movement to not save, but to transform public education is getting stronger. It is necessary to expand the movement to other sectors of the class that are impacted by the crisis, because this is not an economic but a leadership crisis, a crisis of priorities. In Chinese, the pictogram for the word crisis is “dangerous opportunity”. The purpose of a crisis is to point us in a direction, to show us the danger and to point us to an opportunity.

So, parents, children, workers, students, teachers, faculty and citizens of the World: Awake, Arise and Act!

California Public Schools in Crises

We are writing you this letter to ask you to stand up for your sons and daughters, and the public education they must have to survive and thrive in the 21st Century.

Last year, the politicians cut public school funding by more than $5,300,000,000. This year they tell us they’re going to cut even more. They justify themselves by citing all sorts of statistics, but education is not about statistics, it’s about children. And most parents know that their kids in public school are not receiving the education they need. We don’t need to be mathematicians to know that:

• Class sizes are too large because there’s not enough money to hire teachers, and too much is being spent on managers and bureaucrats.
• Many schools are in such poor repair as to be unsafe, with not enough money for maintenance.
• There are constant and worsening shortages of materials, supplies, and equipment.
• Enrichment programs in languages, sports, art, music, and other areas being slashed or eliminated.
• Pre-Kindergarten and Adult Education programs areas being slashed or eliminated.
• Critical positions such as nurses, librarians, counselors, and janitors are being eliminated.
  

They tell us that these cutbacks are because of the current economic crisis, but that’s not true. They’ve been cutting public education for years, long before this latest crises. Proposition 13 was supposed to relieve citizens burdened by excessive property taxes, but most of the benefit went to big business and commercial landlords. Corporations used to pay the majority of education-related taxes, but their share has steadily been reduced so that now individual taxpayers have to carry most of the load, and there is no longer enough money to adequately fund public education even in the good times, let alone the bad.

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“Remember our humanity, and forget all the rest.”

Albert Einstein

The decade has not begun with a paean to human wisdom.  Two recent acts of folly in particular share a deep and pernicious connection that bears some pondering, and I am not even referring to the capture of Ted Kennedy’s seat in a Massachusetts.  I am referring to the 5-4 Supreme Court decision on Thursday last week ratifying an absurd and dangerous notion that had been let loose in the public discourse almost by accident nearly a century ago, namely the legal ‘personhood’ of corporations, and secondly to the introduction of full-body scanning for ‘security’ that is coming soon to airports near you.

The first decision will unfetter corporate influence over policymakers (all in the name of populism, ironically), an influence that was already operating almost without let or hindrance under the present rules.  The second decision reflects is a serious misunderstanding of security (we can know [[total security|real security]] only when we pursue peace and justice, not by walling ourselves in with ever-more-invasive technology), and was apparently arrived at, in unseemly haste, through the kind of corruption that has all too commonly accompanied post-9/11 ‘security’ measures: as Randall Amster reports in his Op-Ed News article, “Invasion of the Body Scanners,” former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff  is a vocal and influential proponent of Rapiscan, the firm that stands to make huge profits from the scanners, and has promoting their cause since long before the Christmas bomber set off  the recent panic. The Chertoff Group, his consulting firm, has Rapiscan as one of its clients!

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Some nourishment for the nonviolent soul on this MLK Day, 2010:

• The Drum Major Instinct, audio and text.
• Beyond Vietnam, audio and text.
• Nobel Prize acceptance speech, text and audio excerpt.
• Resources from the King Institute at Stanford.
• God Bless the Whole World: Spiritual Activism for the 21st Century (Created by Metta Center friend and Metta Mentors alum B Scofield, who also produced the audio mix of Martin’s sermons that begin’s this post.)

And, of course:

Activist, songwriter and singer Aliza Hava created this beautiful inspiring song to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  As Rev. Heng Sure said when Aliza visited Berkeley last week: “She has the energy of the 60s in the body of a 32 year old.” Turn on your speakers, close your eyes and enjoy her well-versed lyrics exploring the deeper levels of love, life, spiritual awakening, social action and the importance of positive social change. 1Music2Unify!

[audio:Martin-Luther-King-Jr-by-Aliza-Hava.mp3]

Hey satyagrahis (and non-satyagrahis, too, of course — we’re all in this together),

For anyone who is interested in exploring the legitimacy of President Obama’s comments on nonviolence in his Nobel Peace Prize speech, check out this informative, easy article by Eric Stoner, posted on the PJSA blog (that’s the Peace and Justice Studies Association), here.

For a cool commentary on Obama’s charge that “A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies”, here is another PJSA blog by self-confessed old-hippie American peacenik Tom Hastings, who gave Obama a C- for his Nobel speech 🙂

And finally, for a unique article that has Obama ‘in conversation’ with Martin Luther King, Jr., on the topic of nonviolence, check out Randall Amster’s recent post, “Keep Your Eyes on the Peace Prize”, on the Huffington Post site. Well done, Randall!

This topic has been a bit overdiscussed at this point, perhaps, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more…and more…and more that we can learn about nonviolence by studying Obama’s words and the response they have engendered. May we learn lessons from our forebears’ experience and wisdom, rather than repeating their fights — and their mistakes.

Considering that the president of the U.S. has just accepted the Nobel Peace Prize by giving a speech on the defense of war, there must be something more we have to learn.

Here’s to history, and to paying attention to what it has to teach us.

Poster’s note: check out this guerilla art action on YouTube: 45 Years, No Progress. Very cool artivism! Then please read on for some advice to the movement from Free Speech veteran Michael Nagler.

Here’s to not wasting energy by reinventing the wheel, but rather, to using the energy we have in skillful ways as a force for continued forward movement and transformation!!

45 Years, No Progress: Students at UC Berkeley take part in a guerilla art action to protest the lack of free speech on campus despite the 45th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement.

A respectful letter to students and other participants of the UC protests,
and to those calling for nonviolent change worldwide,

Having been a passionate participant in the Free Speech Movement (how’s that for full disclosure?), and having devoted much of my life since to figuring out where we succeeded and where we failed (unfortunately, more material on that side of the scale) and what nonviolence is and how it works, I would like to share some suggestions about the present unrest at UC Berkeley and other campuses over the fee hikes — and much broader issues.  In the interests of time I will simply list some concrete features that I believe a successful movement, one that really moved us toward permanent change, would have to have.

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Check out this TED video (below) from neuroscientist VS Ramachandran on mirror neurons (or in his terminology, “Gandhi neurons”…you’ll find out why…)

One of the ways that we define violence at Metta is “coercive action based on an illusion of separateness, or the inability to recognize oneself in the other.” When we do violence to another, the wise would say, we do violence to ourselves. To take that one step further, when we watch another person doing violence to another (read: in the media, TV, video games, in our family relationships, etc.), we also experience that violence ourselves. Violence is based on an illusion of separateness, but it affects us all as interconnected beings, whether we recognize it or not. Just as we can raise our tolerance to alcohol by drinking more, we can raise our tolerance to violence by taking more of it in.

Conversely, nonviolence is a force that reveals itself via an ability to see ourselves in the other, a realization of the non-separation between ourselves and those around us. Research on mirror neurons, though it is new and multi-directional (read: controversial) at this point, can help us to begin to understand the science behind this interrelationship between ourselves, other beings, violence, and nonviolence. This video, and the scientific paradigm of which it is a part, is worth watching, and worth developing. (The video is also available here.) Check it out!

 A quote from VS Ramachandran in the video: “There is no real independent self aloof from other human beings, inspecting the world and inspecting other people; you are in fact connected…quite literally connected by your neurons…and there is no real distinctiveness of your consciousness from someone else’s consciousness. This emerges from an understanding of basic neuroscience.”

We really are all ONE.