Metta’s Opinion

Is This Really About Healthcare?

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Like many, I have been taken aback by the coarse violence — and effective organization — of the backlash against President Obama’s proposed healthcare package.  The lying, shouting, and disruption of what might have been reasoned debates bodes ill for the political culture, and hence the political destiny, of this country.  During the neoconservative hysteria that boiled up around the Presidential ‘election’ of 2000, John Updike commented from the UK, “America has entered another of its phases of historical madness; but this is the worst I have seen.”  Until now.

I don’t want to be a part of the shameless name-calling that’s going on — everyone is calling everyone else a Nazi, it seems — but the contrived ‘populist’ character of the disrupters, fed by and feeding into the ‘faux News’ messages that play on their fears with shameless and endlessly repeated lies does, after all, recall the frightening resonance of the brownshirts in the street with the cynical propaganda from above that became the frenzy that swept Germany into World War Two.  I hope I am exaggerating.

Even if the purpose of the present uproar were good — say, a saner immigration policy or a trimmer military — we would have to be appalled by what it’s doing to our political discourse.  This I do not think is exaggeration: a struggle is going on for the soul of America.

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Nonviolence in Work and in Rest

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I have recently been given an assignment. I have been told that if we are to reach people with a message of nonviolence, it is important that each of us, as individual contributors to the Metta family, take the time to share our thoughts and experiences with nonviolence as they rise to our attention, and to share them with readers via the Metta blog. I have been watching for an opportune moment to do this.

This morning, Sunday morning, I found that moment when I read a beautiful note written by Lorin Peters that I am inspired to share. Thus, I begin my blog posting career today with a reminder to myself and to all of us, a reminder that has become a sort of mantram for me of late: be nonviolent to yourself if you are to be nonviolent at all. 

Nonviolence is not a mere strategy; it is a life lesson. It is a force that can be found existent within, a philosophy of life that can be learned, practiced, and shared. If we are nonviolent in protests or political campaigns, but violent with ourselves (overwork is a common form of self-inflicted violence!), we are not practicing nonviolence. Please join me in remembering that resting and taking care of oneself is a necessary element of a nonviolent life.

Please read the following through as sacred or as secular a lens as you wish. I am not presenting this as a religious message, but as a human message!

A Sabbath Concern

Lorin Peters

2009 August 9

“The team is now working seven days a week, including Sundays.”  This announcement, my first day back on team this year, caught me by surprise.  On my previous trips, the whole team took Sundays off and went to church in Jerusalem.  The announcement continued, “We each work five days a week, and take two days off.”  I was told this new seven days-a-week policy was not requested by our new Palestinian Advisory Council.  I would guess it is a product of our refocusing process last winter.

I wonder if this new policy is a good idea.  Some teammates have suggested, “Our mission, to reduce violence, is like a nonviolent police function.  Police have to be on duty seven days a week.”  But we are not the only ones who know how to reduce violence.  Palestinians have a long history of nonviolent resistance.  And ISM and EAPPI often have teams in Al Khalil (Hebron).  Might feeling that ‘the natives can’t survive without us’ be a western, and patronizing, viewpoint?

One of the Ten Commandments says, “Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.” (Exod 20:8)  When Moses announced this, it was to a people who were struggling to survive.  Every sabbath became an extra day in the desert.  God was in effect saying, “Trust in me.  I am in charge here.  You will not die because you rested.”  Does a day of rest not increase, rather than decrease, our ability to do good work?

Jesus did qualify this; “Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it out?  How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep?  So it is lawful to do good on the sabbath.” (Matt 12: 11-12)  It is good to save life on the sabbath.  But I do not think he intended that we should walk around looking for sheep, or people, to save every sabbath.

I have spent much time talking with as well as reading Rabbi Michael Lerner.  Observing the sabbath is one of his constant messages.  No work on the Sabbath.  Rest, relax, play, read, reflect, pray, grow, make love, but do no work.  I suspect this applies to whole societies as well as to individuals.  Is not working seven days a week part of our secular, materialist culture?

Nonviolence often does not “work” in the way we expect or hope it to.  But principled nonviolence, which Gandhi and King practiced, from a spiritual ground or center, always works in some deeper or unexpected ways, beyond or outside our understanding (see Michael Nagler, “The Search for a Nonviolent Future”, chapter 4, “Work” Versus Work, pp 87-130).  That is the nature, and the beauty, of faithfulness and humility and selflessness.  The seed that falls to earth and dies does not know that it will sprout and grow and blossom into a whole new life.

Blessed are the meek, the gentle, the nonviolent;
for they shall inherit the earth.

 

An Open Letter to Sisters and Brothers in Iran

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…at a rally on June 17:

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Translation:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Dear Friends,

We are a group of professors, students and activists of [[nonviolence]] who work with nonviolent movements and we would like to extend to you our solidarity and encouragement for your struggle. Based on our experience, we would share the following thoughts with you at this critical juncture:

Your cause is just. Despite the blackout, people all over the world are following your struggle and our hearts are with you. To have a just cause and courage are the two main requirements for a nonviolent movement, and you have both.

What you have done already is to open up a bridge between the people of Iran and the people of America and many other parts of the world. Your protest has created an emotional bridge with people everywhere — for who does not love freedom? — and shown us in the West in particular that many, many Iranians are just like us, and not the hardliners our media have often portrayed you to be. This is a great achievement that has already changed history.

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Recent Video, In Solidarity with the Iranian People

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We recorded this on Friday, before the government crackdown began. Michael Nagler and the Metta Center staff would like to express our continued solidarity with the protesters, and urge them to stay the course through this difficult part of the struggle: “Don’t seek suffering, but know that if it comes to you, it is often part of the very success of a nonviolent movement”.

 

Nonviolence in the Middle East: Obama’s Cairo Speech

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By Starhawk

On Thursday, President Obama made his speech to the Arab world in Cairo, a speech that did what he does so well,  expressing contradictions and nuances in clear, simple poetic language that calls on everyone to be better than we are.  My first reaction, reading it, was “This speech makes us all safer, and does a better job of it than a thousand drone attacks or military forays.”  By so clearly expressing respect for Islam, and knowledge of its history and contributions, he drains extremist venom of its potency.
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Obama also tackled head-on the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian problem:  Israel’s continued building of and support for illegal settlements.  I suspect many people are still unclear on the concept of ‘settlement’: the word creates an image of a stalwart, noble outpost in the wilderness.  In reality, settlements are more like gated suburbs plunked down in the midst of Palestinian territory, villages, farms and cities that have always been in Palestinian hands and that the Oslo agreements and the Road Map define as destined for a Palestinian state.

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The Cassandra Syndrome

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Last month, 57 people have lost their lives in eight mass shootings across America. “The killing grounds,” Timothy Egan wrote in the New York Times last week, “include a nursing home, a center for new immigrants, a child’s bedroom. Before that it was a church, a college, a daycare center.”  It is hard to argue when he calls this epidemic “the cancer at the core of our democracy.”

The only difference is, we don’t know what causes cancer.  It’s not that hard to understand why we’re experiencing an upsurge in “senseless violence” (I predicted it, for example, and I’m no expert).  More to the point, it isn’t all that hard to see what we can do about it.

This rash of killings was an uptick on a very general trend. That’s important, because we don’t want to just level out the trend that is already higher than any country calling itself civilized should put up with: we want it drastically lower.  We want the killing to stop.  It’s not particularly easy to face why we’ve been inflicted with all this violence, but we must, because how else will we find a solution.  And in the end, the solution may not be as unpleasant as we think.

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Silver Linings

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Forward-looking thinkers who are — for now — on the ‘prophetic’ fringe of mainstream economics have been saying for some time that the shocking fragility of our fiscal system, and our economy generally, is an ‘opportunity’ as well as a ‘crisis.’ In the words of David Korten of the Positive Futures Network, what we should be doing is “not fixing the system, but replacing it.” While they are not against short-term measures or protecting the vulnerable, they are urging us not to go back to sleep after we’ve done that, but to realize that the present system is inherently fragile, unfair, and in the end an obstacle to real human progress. What we need instead is an economy that is locally based, simple, and closer to real human needs; and such a system could be built up from the innumerable experiments in barter, local currencies, and other imaginative ‘innovations’ that are already happening (for the most part, they’re actually based on systems of yesteryear that worked fine until the craze for wealth, driven by the materialistic worldview and materialistic values of the modern age, sent them the way of the electric car).

I have a strange comment to make about this wildly ambitious scheme: it’s not enough.

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