James O'Dea: Becoming Effective Ambassadors of Peace

Quotes from James O'Dea

How we behave is influenced by what we see within the limits of what we know.

Those who recognize our essential qualities are the true peacebuilders: they let us know that they see the significance of our lives. Meanness of spirit stems from a place of neglect and the absence of nurturance and love. When we have not been seen and loved for who we are, we can turn sour and even violent.

The intergenerational transfer of wounds is the greatest threat to peace, just as it is the greatest cause of war.

Your values were packaged by religious, national, racial, and cultural identities, and the package contains both outmoded and very relevant material that you have to sort through.

We are, in fact, designed for movement, progress, evolution, and new stories, even as we must recapitulate the wisdom transmitted to us by our forebears. As we gain new information, different perspectives, and fresh insight, we fire and wire new neural pathways; this phenomenon is referred to as the neuroplasticity of the brain. We are wired to explore, initiate, and create.

When we can really put ourselves in the shoes of the other, when we can reach new depths of empathy, then we can be effective ambassadors of peace.

Love is solar; it radiates.

― James O'Dea,  

Cultivating Peace: Becoming a 21st-Century Peace Ambassador

 

Frank Ostaseski: The Transformational Gifts of Grief

No matter how spiritual we are, we remain human. Grief is among the most human of experiences. The tasks of grieving are not about “getting over” our experience or “getting rid” of uncomfortable feelings. Grieving is not about transcendence or having some kind of positive spiritual view. It is to feel it all and gradually to deeply appreciate life and life’s preciousness by understanding impermanence.

The death of someone we love can totally transform us as humans. That transformation can be revolutionary in that it completely changes our life. We do not go back to who we were before the loss. We are changed by it forever. Grief deepens you. Our losses can wake us up to an undying love. Grief can be a unifying force. It can carry us from fractured states of separation to a deeper state of unity with our own selves and others.

-  Frank Ostaseski 

Michael Meade: Acts of Truth

Dear Friends of Mosaic,

Since the recent election I have encountered many people, young and old, who feel deeply disheartened by all the resentment, hatred and division that have been stirred up. Many also feel discouraged by all the false promises, “fake news” and betrayals of the public trust. Amidst the distribution of outright lies, I keep thinking of an old story from India about the spread of poison and the need to tell the truth.

The tale begins when a child, playing with a ball, is bitten by a poisonous snake. By the time the parents arrive the venom has spread, leaving the little one unconscious. With no doctor near, they carry the child to a local monk and implore the holy man to save the youngster. The monk declares that he is not the kind of religious person who knows how to heal.

The parents pleaded that someone on a spiritual path must have the power to perform an act of truth that could reverse the course of the poison. Saying that he only knew the truth of his own life, the monk placed his hand upon the child’s head. He then revealed that he had long before lost any sense of true holiness and only kept up a saintly appearance. No sooner had this act of truth been made than the eyes of the child opened again.

The holy man insisted that the father use his power to tell the truth to remove more poison. With his hands on his child’s chest, the father confessed that though widely respected and envied for his wealth and position, he never felt generous to others or fulfilled within himself. He owned that he felt empty inside despite all his power and wealth. After this act of truth the child sat up but could not stand or move from the spot.

The father asked the mother to use her power of truth to save their child. She spoke the truth she carried in her heart: that her child was the only one she had ever loved, that her marriage brought her no love and that she remained in it only out of fear. No sooner was the act of truth performed than the remaining poison left the child, who rose up and began to play with the ball again.

The child in the story can represent all the children of the future being harmed by the growing poisons in the present culture. The ball can represent the world itself, which seems to hang in the balance between falseness and truth. In order to stop the spread of poison, the adults must come to an understanding that those who fail to act in accord with their deepest sense of self not only negate the spirit of their own lives, but also endanger others by adding to the poison in the world.

There are times when it becomes necessary for people to stand for something genuine in order to reverse the course of life that has become so deeply poisoned. Any true stand must begin in the depths of the soul where the truth resides and waits to be raised to the light of day. In the face of all the false rhetoric it becomes easier to forget that we are in a struggle for the sanctity of our own souls as well as a battle for the Soul of the World.

Genuine change begins in the depths of the individual soul and this is the struggle we came for; this is the healing we came to help create. Something deep in our hearts instinctively stands with those who are standing at Standing Rock, braving the winds of arrogance and falsehood that poison both nature and culture. We can see that standing for the truth and speaking truth to power can reverse the course of greed and exploitation.

There are truths set within the soul that can be a medicine and an antidote against the rampant falsehoods and manipulations increasingly being used to create fear and havoc and gain power. It is not enough to simply decry the fake news and false facts being used to justify the worst of our instincts and feelings. This is the time to make acts of truth wherever the environment is threatened, wherever tyranny tries to rule, wherever power tries to dominate over love.

Mahatma Gandhi drew upon ancient stories when he named his stand against tyranny and social injustice satyagraha which translates as “the force of truth.” Satya can mean “truth in speech,” but it also implies love and beauty. A similar idea appears in the Ode to Innocence where the poet John Keats states: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all you know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

I know that most of you work in some way to bring truth and healing to the world. Some work in the trenches of the environmental movement, some in the streets for social justice. Others offer therapy and mentoring and many make beauty through art and music. All true paths are healing paths and all need to be supported. This is the time to take a stand for truth and beauty and support the healing work that resonates with your soul. If that support includes Mosaic, we are deeply grateful to you. Meanwhile, we support your efforts to bring truth and beauty and love to a world in desperate need of healing.

Peace and blessings,

Michael Meade 

https://www.mosaicvoices.org/acts-of-truth.html

Humans in Dark Times

Henry Giroux: "Humans in Dark Times edited by Brad Evans is brilliant series of interviews on the human condition and violence in the age of Trump and late modernity. A must read, especially for students. Brad Evans is one of our best scholars and public intellectuals."

 Eleven thinkers help us rethink what it might mean to 

be human in the 21st century

Writing in the late 1960s, Hannah Arendt conjured the term “dark times” to address the legacies of war and human suffering.

Arendt was not simply concerned with mapping out the totalitarian conditions into which humanity had descended. She was also acutely aware of the importance of individuals who challenge with integrity the abuses of power in all their oppressive forms. Countering violence, she understood, demands sustained intellectual engagement: We are all watchpersons, guided by the lessons and cautions of centuries of unnecessary devastation.

Over the past year, we have engaged in a series of discussions with prominent and committed intellectuals who are all concerned in various ways with developing a critique of violence adequate to our times.

Sadly, many of the warnings offered have become more pressing than ever. Across the world, it is possible to witness the liberation of prejudice, galvanized by the emergence of a politics of hate and division that plays directly into the everyday fears of those seduced by new forms of fascism.

The mission of The Stone is to explore issues both timely and timeless. Violence is evidently such a phenomenon, demanding purposeful and considered historical reflection. But here we immediately encounter a problem: If fighting violence demands new forms of ethical thinking that can be developed only with the luxury of time, what does this mean for the present moment when history is being steered in a more dangerous direction and seems to move more quickly every day?

Perhaps one answer is that any viable critique of violence will not arrive from any singular, sovereign academic who might offer reductive explanations of its causes and propose orthodox solutions. Such a stance leads to the domestication of thought, often in the politicized service of a select few. Instead, we need to have a serious conversation among thinkers, advocates, artists and others that leads to a new textual borderland of open inquiry, where poetry slips into the demands for human dignity and the importance of transdisciplinary conversations are not simply focused on revealing the crises of contemporary political thought but encourage a rethinking of what it might mean to be human in the 21st century.

With this in mind, it is useful to revisit the articles in this series to draw out some of the more important common threads, insights and shared concerns. While not in any way exhaustive, the various conversations we have already undertaken present us with a possible framework in which to begin a better discussion of the problem of violence and to imagine more peaceful relations among the world’s people. So here are 11 lessons worth considering:

1. All violence has a history. Simon Critchley began this series with a powerful call to recognize our shared histories of violence and how we can still make use of the past to better understand the present moment. Understanding the cyclical nature of violence is crucial if we are to gain a tangible grip on its contemporary manifestations and look to engage in the difficult and fraught process of breaking the cycle. Violence in this regard should never be thought about in the abstract. It is “a lived reality,” as Critchley writes, with a very “concrete history” that is wedded to that tradition we call human tragedy. Indeed, it is precisely by projecting a tragic light on history that we humans are able to imagine a world beyond suffering and neglect. This is why the arts are crucial to developing a civic response to violence.

2. Violence is all about the violation of bodies and the destruction of human lives. For that reason, violence should never be studied in an objective and unimpassioned way. It points to a politics of the visceral that cannot be divorced from our ethical and political concerns. We encountered this head on in the personal testimony provided by George Yancy. In direct response to Yancy’s previous column on race], he received a number of violent threats, which revealed how the politics of racial persecution is tied to the psychic life of violence. Violence concerns the anti-intellectual conditions in which the persecution of “the Other” can be normalized and become part of the everyday fabric of existence. Words in this regard can literally wound a person.

 3. For violence to take hold, there is a need to suppress the memory of historical persecution. This weaponization of ignorance, as Henry Giroux explains, points to the violence of organized forgetting. We see this being played out in the contemporary moment. Demands for a return to “greatness” represent what Walter Benjamin would have identified in his “Critique of Violence” as being a naked appeal to mythical violence, born of the desire to create a false unity among people by actually creating the most pernicious divisions. Education in this setting, as Giroux argues, is precisely where effective counterterror strategies begin. Education is always a form of political intervention, which at its best produces critically minded individuals who have the courage to speak truth to power and stand alongside the globally oppressed, because they remember violence that the oppressors would prefer to forget.

Please continue this article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/opinion/humans-in-dark-times.html?smid=fb-share

Morbid Inequality: Now Just SIX Men Have as Much Wealth as Half the World's Population

Published

by

Common Dreams

 

by

Paul Buchheit

 

"Inequality is extreme and pathological and getting worse every year," writes Paul Buchheit. (Photo: Austin Kirk/flickr/cc)

Yes, inequality is getting worse every year. In early 2016 Oxfam reported that just 62 individuals had the same wealth as the bottom half of humanity. About a year later Oxfam reported that just 8 men had the same wealth as the world's bottom half. Based on the same methodology and data sources used by Oxfam, that number is now down to 6. 

How to account for the dramatic increase in the most flagrant and perverse of extreme inequalities? Two well-documented reasons: (1) The poorest half (and more) of the world has continued to lose wealth; and (2) The VERY richest individuals -- especially the top thousand or so -- continue to add billions of dollars to their massive fortunes. 

Inequality deniers and apologists say the Oxfam methodology is flawed, but they're missing the big picture. Whether it's 6 individuals or 62 or 1,000 doesn't really matter. The data from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Databook (GWD) and the Forbes Billionaire List provide the best available tools to make it clear that inequality is extreme and pathological and getting worse every year.

How It's Gone from 62 to 6 in One Year 

As of 02/17/17, the world's 6 richest individuals (all men) had $412 billion. Tables 2-4 and 3-4 of the 2016 GWD reveal that the poorest five deciles of the world population own just .16% of the $256 trillion in global wealth, or $410 billion. That latter figure is based on mid-2016 data, but since then the status of the bottom 50% has not improved, and has in fact likely worsened, as both global debt and global inequality have increased. 

Just a year ago, on 03/01/16, the world's 6 richest men had $343 billion. They're the same men today, although slightly rearranged as they play "king of the hill": Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos Slim Helu (with Larry Ellison jockeying for position). The wealth of these six men increased by $69 billion in just one year. 

Just a year ago, according to the 2015 GWD, the poorest five deciles of the world population owned much more than today, close to $1.5 trillion. What happened? It's very clear: the world's richest 10% (mostly the richest 1%) gained nearly $4 trillion while every other segment of the global population lost wealth. 

That's worth a second look. The world's total wealth is about $256 trillion, and in JUST ONE YEAR the richest 10% drained nearly $4 trillion away from the rest of civilization.

It's Not Just the Bottom Half: A 500-Seat Auditorium Could Hold As Much Wealth as 70% of the World's Population 

According to the Forbes Billionaire List, the world's richest 500 individuals have $4.73 trillion in wealth. Tables 2-4 and 3-4 of the GWD reveal that the poorest seven deciles of the world population own just 1.86% of the $256 trillion in global wealth, or $4.76 trillion. That's over two-thirds of all the people on earth. That means 5,000,000,000 people -- FIVE BILLION people -- have, on average, and after debt is figured in, about a thousand dollars each in home and property and savings.

In the U.S., the Forbes 400 Own as Much as 3/5 of the American People 

The bottom 60% of Americans, according to Table 6-5 in the GWD, own 3 percent of the nation's $85 trillion in total wealth, or $2.55 trillion. The Forbes 400 owned $2.4 trillion in October 2016, and that's been steadily increasing. 

So as apologists like the National Review refer to "a growing upper-middle class" of people earning over $100,000 a year, they're inadvertently offering an explanation for the demise of the middle class: Some are moving up, way up; many others are dropping to the lower-middle-class or below. The once sizable and stable middle of America is splitting into two.

Please continue this article here: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/02/20/morbid-inequality-now-just-six-men-have-much-wealth-half-worlds-population