Isabel Allende & Others: Women Bringing Peace to the Planet

Image of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers

I can promise you that women working together -
linked, informed, educated -
can bring peace and prosperity
to this forsaken planet.

- Isabel Allende

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Being Indian is an attitude, a state of mind, a way of
being in harmony with all things and all beings.
It is allowing the heart to be the distributor of energy
on this planet; to allow feelings and sensitivities
to determine where energy goes;
bringing aliveness up from the Earth and from the Sky,
putting it in and giving it out from the heart.

- Brooke Medicine Eagle

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The abuse of the Earth is the ecological crisis.
We are either going to have a future where women
lead the way to make peace on Earth 
or we are not going to have a human future at all. 

- Vandana Shiva   
   

Michelle Alexander: The Myth of Desegregation

Inmates at a state prison in Chino, Calif., exercise in the yard

 KEVORK DJANSEZIAN / GETTY IMAGES

The Myth of Desegregation

By Michelle Alexander

Early this week a bit of cheery news was reported by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank: black segregation has hit its lowest point in more than a century — declining in all 85 of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. In a stunning turn of events, we are told that “ghetto neighborhoods have witnessed profound population decline, as former residents decamp for the suburbs.”

The report dutifully acknowledges that we still have a long way to go. The study’s authors, Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser and Duke University professor Jacob Vigdor, explain that “[t]he typical urban African American lives in a housing market where more than half of the black population would need to move in order to achieve complete integration.” Nevertheless, the report is largely celebratory in tone, and it has been received in that fashion by much of the news media.

Before we break out the champagne, however, it may be wise to pause and reflect for a moment on who was excluded from the analysis.

Our nation’s prison population has more than quintupled (soaring from 300,000 in the mid-1970s to more than 2 million today), due to a “get tough” movement and a war on drugs that has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color. Studies have consistently shown that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, but a fierce drug war has been waged nonetheless, and harsh mandatory minimum sentences passed, leading to a prison-building boom unprecedented in world history. Despite this sea change, prisoners continue to be treated as nonentities in much sociological and economic analysis.

(MORE: Adam Cohen: The New Battle over Voting Rights)

In the Manhattan Institute study, prisoners are not even mentioned, despite the fact that millions of poor people — overwhelmingly people of color — are removed from their communities and held in prisons, often hundreds of miles from home. Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new and bizarre form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Ghetto youth are transferred from their decrepit, underfunded, racially segregated schools to brand new, high-tech prisons located in white rural counties.

In a sense, mass incarceration has emerged as a far more extreme form of physical and residential segregation thanJim Crow segregation. Rather than merely shunting people of color to the other side of town, people are locked in literal cages — en masse. Bars and walls keep hundreds of thousands away from mainstream society — a form of apartheid unlike the world has even seen. If all of them suddenly returned, they would not be sprinkled evenly throughout the nation’s population. Instead they would return to a relatively small number of communities defined by race and class, greatly intensifying the levels of segregation we see today. The likelihood of many escaping their ghettoized communities and landing in racially integrated, well-manicured suburbs is slim, given that people labeled criminals and felons can be legally discriminated against for the rest of their lives in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits — even denied food stamps. Although most people sent to prison are convicted of relatively minor, nonviolent crimes and drug offenses, they are treated as perpetual threats and locked in a permanent undercaste.

Those who imagine that the failure to account for prisoners can’t possibly affect the analysis would be wise to consider the distortion of unemployment figures in recent years. Because standard unemployment reports continue to exclude prisoners, we have been treated to a highly misleading picture of black unemployment. According to Harvard professor Bruce Western, standard unemployment figures underestimate the true jobless rate by as much as 24 percentage points for less educated black men. In fact, during the 1990s — the economic-boom years — noncollege black men were the only group that experienced a sharp increase in unemployment, a development directly traceable to the sudden explosion of the prison population. At the same time that unemployment rates were sinking to record low levels for the general population, the true jobless rate among noncollege black men soared to a staggering 42% (65% for black male drop outs.)

(MORE: Touré: Nostalgia: Our Favorite Cultural Cop-Out)

Prisoners do matter when analyzing the severity of racial inequality in the U.S. Yet because they are out of sight and out of mind, it is easy to imagine that we are making far more racial progress than we actually are. For now, let’s keep the cork in the bottle and pray that we will eventually awaken from our color-blind slumber to the persistent realities of race in America.

http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/03/the-myth-of-desgregation/

Michelle Alexander

Alexander is a civil rights lawyer, advocate and legal scholar. 

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Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

We Are All Related

As the Rays of one Sun
As the Waves of one Ocean
Refreshed by the same Breeze
As Fruits of one Tree
Mitakuye Oyasin
We are all related.

from The Goddess. Mother Earth. Mother Nature.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/charityelise/2172231774/in/photostream/

To Be One

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing 
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

 

- Rumi

Rumi: We Hide In Each Other

In fact, my Soul and yours are the same. 

You appear in me, I appear in you. 

We hide in each other.

~Rumi

♥

from Earthschool harmony

Gabrielle Roth: Four Questions

In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions: "When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by stories? When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence?

- Gabrielle Roth

 

from peaceworks

Frances Moore Lappé: Fear Kills

Fear Kills

by Frances Moore Lappé

We see fear's face everywhere, whether in a Congress debating assault weapons or in schools introducing lock-down drills.

And for most species fear is, of course, key to survival. Sensing danger, a healthy animal experiences instantaneous physical changes that enable it to escape; then, once the threat has passed, the impala literally shakes off its fear and runs back to join its group.

But could it be that for human animals fear itself has become a danger? To explore the possibility, a place to start is asking what humans most fear.

It is the loss of standing with others, the fear of being cast out by the tribe. Rather than being hyper-individualists, as one often hears, Homo sapiens are profoundly social creatures -- actually, the most social of species. This sense of standing is inseparable from trust. To thrive, we need to trust that we count in the eyes of others and will, therefore, be treated with respect. In a word, our fear is loss of dignity.

Almost equal is our fear of powerlessness. Human beings need to feel that we make a difference. Social psychologist Erich Fromm argued in The Heart of Man that what characterizes man is that "he is driven to make his imprint on the world." And later he dismissed Descartes' axiom about a human essence centered in thought, declaring instead: "I am, because I effect."

So, when these essential two needs -- for connection and agency -- are unmet, we go nuts. We try to get respect by whatever means possible. If peaceful means seem closed off, violence it is.

In his book Violence, psychologist James Gilligan asked a Massachusetts prison inmate, "What do you want so badly that you would sacrifice everything in order to get it?" The inmate declared: "Pride. Dignity. Self-esteem... and I'll kill every mother-fucker in that cell block if I have to in order to get it," Or, as another inmate said, "I've got to have my self-respect, and I've declared war on the whole world till I get it."

Pride, dignity, respect, agency -- a sense that we matter -- these are feelings largely shaped interpersonally. We depend upon the social fabric to get them. But, ours is in tatters, with fewer and fewer of us feeling a sense of belonging and more and more preoccupied with a desperate scramble for belongings.

Inequality has soared to historic levels. In 2010, the top 1 percent garnered 93 percent of all income gains. And, in countries as well as the U.S., high income inequality is linked to low levels of trust, report British scholars Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level.

Trapped in a giant game of musical chairs, we run faster and faster to edge out the guy ahead. For, with economic rules that increasingly concentrate wealth, we know we could be the next one kicked out, no matter how quick our pace. So we take on debt, juggle three jobs, cheat in school -- whatever it takes to stay "in."

And our children are most sensitive to this fear of exclusion. Those who've felt bullied, unable to fit in, misunderstood, without a voice in those most social of places -- schools -- are more likely tobecome psychotic and violent, including against themselves.

In a culture of fear of disconnection, those at the bottom feel most dismissed and discounted. Adam Smith -- the supposed, but misunderstood -- hampion of the market, more than two centuries ago grasped the devastating power of exclusion: Poverty, he wrote in the Theory of Moral Sentiments "places... [a person] out of the sight of mankind ... [T]o feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope... of human nature."

In this vein, joblessness isn't just about money. It's about loss of "membership." Martin Luther King once said that "[i]n our society it is murder, psychologically, to deprive a man of a job or an income. You are in substance saying to that man he has no right to exist."

 And that is exactly how many feel: A rise of 1 percent in joblessness in the U.S. is accompanied by an increase of roughly 1 percent in the suicide rate.

Overall, in our world of increasing inequalities suicide now claims more lives than homicide and war combined. Americans own more than four in 10 of the world's privately held guns, and nearlytwo-thirds of U.S. gun deaths in 2010 were suicides.

And when people feel "dissed," violence toward the powerless increases, too: For "each 1 percent increase in unemployment was associated with at least a 0.50 per 1,000 increase in confirmed child maltreatment reports one year later." Since the recession began in 2007, the number U.S. children killed by maltreatment has risen by about 20 percent to more than five children each day. Thus, our culture of fear gets passed down from one generation to another.

So, what can we do to break free from the spiral of fear and worsening violence?

Maybe we begin here: recognizing that our crisis is not that we humans are too individualistic, or too selfish. It's that we've lost touch with how deeply social we really are. Easing the fear at the root of so much pain and violence that generates more fear -- from suicide to child abuse to school massacres -- comes as we embrace the obvious: We are creatures who, in order to thrive individually, depend on inclusive communities in which all can thrive.

Freedom starts there. We build it by standing up for rules on which inclusive, trusting community depends: fair rules, for example, that keep wealth circulating and strictly out of public decision making; and rules that ensure decent jobs for all. This pathway out of a violence-soaked culture is no foreign "ism." It is what's proven essential to our species' thriving -- communities of trust without which we destroy, not just others but ourselves as well.

Adapted from EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think to Create the World We Want (new in paperback from Nation Books)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/frances-moore-lappe/fear-kills_b_2957241.html 

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  Every aspect of our lives is, in a sense, a vote for the kind of world we want to live in.
― Frances Moore Lappé 

The True Costs of Industrialized Food

Protesting in Los Angeles. (Photo: Jeremy Seifert ,www.gmofilm.com)

 

“We are the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe. And reclaiming the democratic control over our food and water and our ecological survival is the necessary project for our freedom.” - Vandana Shiva, physicist and activist

By Beverly Bell and Tory Field:

The objective of much of our industrial food system is to provide a profit to shareholders and CEOs. Coca-Cola’s advertising budget was over $2.9 billion dollars in 2010, money well spent from a stockholder’s point of view: profits that year were $11.8 billion.

The current system, however, was not built only to amass wealth. Many policymakers and supporters, historically as today, have been driven by the conviction that industrial agriculture is the best way to produce massive amounts of affordable food. And in some ways it has accomplished this. People in the U.S. spend relatively little on food – about 7 percent of their total spending, as compared to 13 percent in France, 23 percent in Mexico, and 38 percent in Vietnam. Most individuals in the U.S. devote less time, energy, and money to feeding ourselves than they ever have historically.

On the buying end, it seems an irresistibly good deal, our 99¢ soda or $1.50 loaf of bread. But these prices represent just a fraction of the true costs of getting that soda and bread into our shopping bags. We pay for the hidden costs of the corporate food supply chain in multiple ways, not all of them financially.

We subsidize food corporations through our taxes, which pay for public works like transportation infrastructure for long-distance shipping (highways, airports, and railroads), communication infrastructure (satellites, television, radio and internet), energy infrastructure (coal plants and nuclear power stations), and research and development (like government-funded crop research). Tax dollars also fund the government subsidies that keep certain crop prices low, allowing corporations to create their processed foods so cheaply.

Small- and medium-sized farmers pay extremely high hidden costs. Their farms have been steadily disappearing as land is further consolidated into the hands of fewer people. The U.S. has lost 800,000 farmers and ranchers in the last 40 years. Between 1900 and 2002, the number of farms in the U.S. shrank by 63 percent, while the average farm size increased by 67 percent.[ii] The dairy industry has undergone an even starker decline: in just over 35 years, between 1970 and 2006, the country lost 88 percent of its dairy farms, while the average herd size per farm increased from 19 to 120 cows.

Some populations, depending on class, race, nationality, and livelihood, pay more dearly than others. As mentioned in our previous piece, black farmers and land owners suffer. Farmworkers and other laborers all along the food supply chain also pay by receiving inadequate wages; they are twice as likely to live below the poverty line....

As consumers, we all pay with our health and well-being. Our country’s most popular cuisine is affectionately called ‘junk,’ after all. Eating the highly processed food made readily available to us has led to epidemic levels of diabetes and heart disease. Individuals get chastised for their own diet-related problems while ‘junk’ food is much easier and cheaper to access than healthy food.

Recent outbreaks of Listeria and stomach acid-resistant E. coli are other manifestations of the costs to our health. Food-safety experts blame the industrialized production of grain-fed cattle and poultry for the emergence of these dangerous bacteria strains.[iii]

Our planet pays profound hidden costs: polluted water, air, and soil; deforestation; acid rain; species extinction; and climate change. The corporate food system wreaks countless ecological harms....

 If all of these costs showed up in the prices we pay at the store, things would be very different. If prices reflected the oil that powers the jet to bring a banana thousands of miles, together with the air pollution that results, the workers’ healthcare costs after handling pesticides, and the future loss of soil health due to monocropping, this fruit would certainly be a luxury item in the North rather than part of an average American breakfast.

Has agribusiness won such control that a turnaround is impossible? No. Small farmers, grassroots groups, and advocacy organizations are demanding food sovereignty, meaning the right of every people to produce adequate, healthy, affordable, and culturally appropriate food for all. They are everywhere creating and supporting community-controlled, scaled-down, local food networks. Dismantling the governmental policies and global trade rules that have taken agriculture out of the hands of small farmers the world over is the prerequisite for claiming a just and healthy food system.

For the complete article, please go here: http://truth-out.org/news/item/15300-the-true-costs-of-industrailized-food

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When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world. -- John Muir