Perhaps this should have been posted a while ago, before the Michael Jackson news fatigue settled in, but like a lot of people I’m only now—by way of nostalgic revision—starting to truly appreciate his artistry. Beyond the undeniable excitement of his music and performances, however, I’ve come to see there’s a great deal more to his persona than the paparazzi and our consumptive Western media culture are willing to show us.

For instance, by way of the Times of India, I learned that Michael drew great inspiration from Gandhi* and took to heart his famous saying, “Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” In a speech he gave at Oxford Union in 2001, Michael spoke about his own experience of learning to forgive his father for the beatings and detachment he suffered as a child, taking that all important nonviolent step of loving and understanding your enemy.

I have started reflecting on the fact that my father grew up in the South, in a very poor family. He came of age during the Depression and his own father, who struggled to feed his children, showed little affection towards his family and raised my father and his siblings with an iron fist. Who could have imagined what it was like to grow up a poor black man in the South, robbed of dignity, bereft of hope, struggling to become a man in a world that saw my father as subordinate … My father moved to Indiana and had a large family of his own, working long hours in the steel mills, work that kills the lungs and humbles the spirit, all to support his family. Is it any wonder that he found it difficult to expose his feelings? Is it any mystery that he hardened his heart, that he raised the emotional ramparts? And most of all, is it any wonder why he pushed his sons so hard to succeed as performers, so that they could be saved from what he knew to be a life of indignity and poverty?

He closed his speech with the Gandhi quote and told those who felt let down or cheated by their parents to resist the urge to push away and instead give them “the gift of unconditional love, so that they too may learn how to love from us.”

Somehow, through all his sufferings—at the hands of an abusive father and a parasitic media—he became and remained a loving and forgiving person. And yet, we never grant him credit for this hard work of the soul. All we can do is focus on his eccentricities, and maybe, if we’re feeling empathetic, as we have these past few weeks, we’ll accept them as a manifestation of his lost childhood and an ever-demanding media spotlight. At our worst, when we have no empathy, we dismiss that which we don’t like or understand about him as perversion and deviance.

As such, a man who was all too human—vulnerable to abuse and objectification, sympathetic to warmth and kindness—can never be seen as anything more than a freak of circumstance, a non-human. This is the real tragedy of Jackson’s legacy. May he forgive us.

*Gandhi and King both appear in his “Man in the Mirror” music video, above.

A day after protesters stopped logging trucks from entering a timber sale on the Elliott State Forest in Oregon, police dismantled the blockade and arrested upwards of 27 protesters. Organizers are vowing to continue the fight today with a march.

• Thousands took to the streets in Tehran yesterday, in defiance of the violent crackdown. The protests coincided with the anniversary of the student uprising of 1999, which was also suppressed, with hundreds of dissidents jailed, injured or killed.

• Police arrested 26 demonstrators at the U.S. Capitol on Thursday during a protest of federal HIV/AIDS policy.

• Greenpeace activists unfurled a protest banner at an Italian coal-fired power station yesterday to underscore the need for G8 action on climate change.

• Tens of thousands of Chilean government employees are on strike to protest unfair labor policies.

• A group of women protesting the poor living conditions they’ve endured since an earthquake hit their region of Italy were ignored by the visiting group of first ladies from the G8 summit.

• Students from across the Philippines are set to walk out of their classrooms today to protest the moves by the Arroyo regime to amend the Constitution.

• Residents Salsburgh, Scotland staged a sit-in protest on the main road through their village to voice their concerns over the safety of a planned bridge.

My present travels in Costa Rica with the photographer Lucas Foglia, through a sequence of chance connections and exaggerated truths, landed us the opportunity to be in the press section at today’s meeting between (Nobel laureate) President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica and the two contenders for the presidency of neighboring Honduras. We understand our work here more under the auspices of art than plain reporting—to the point that we ultimately thought more about the press corps gazing upon the performances than the content of the acts themselves, whose Spanish we couldn’t fully understand anyway.

This was the scene: reporters gathered in a cordoned-off half-block of street in front of Arias’s house, with all their thick wires, cameras large and small, questions, computers, recorders, hook-ups, makeup, grumbles, and banter. There was a stage set up at the front of our pen, by the entrance to the house, surrounded by potted plants and guarded by tourist police in white shirts armed only with the friendliest-looking of clubs. Most press stayed all day, mainly waiting from morning through evening. We arrived in mid-afternoon. Not long after, at the back of the press area, on the opposite site of the press section from the prepared stage, a cluster of protesters arrived, bearing flags and banners in revolutionary red, shouting familiar slogans. There was a charge to the rear, pulling correspondents from their posts at the presidents’ stage. I joined.

Dozens of bored reporters finally had something to do, fixing their lenses and microphones and adrenaline on the passionate ones making so much noise through their loudspeakers. Against militarism. Against the powers that be and their inexhaustible corruption. One dressed as Che. An effigy burned. I let my voice recorder take in a speech from one of the ringleaders, far too fast for me to understand. I took too many pictures that have already been taken before in countless places, at countless protests. My hope was to find somewhere its unique vitality, doubtlessly somewhere, awaiting its capture by a sympathetic observer who could make this event really exist by recording it, by broadcasting it, by turning it from what it was to what it represents.

On the other side, the large, immovable cameras still awaited the presidents. They fixed on an empty stage, or on the door from which these men would emerge.

Will this sacred dissent be heard over the decorous speeches, I wondered? They were loud. We, among our cameras and our wires that ran under us like roots in a forest, were huddled between two competing performances, each competing for its presence in the final ontology of that moment. According to research I’ve seen in cognitive science, while people may be able to talk abstractly about the possibility of simultaneous things, “in fact” (says the science) no—in the intuitive processes of human minds, only one event can happen at any given time and be an event, fully. As gatekeepers of event-ness in media culture, the cameras adjudicated a contest of two events, one on either side of the street.

Each had its violence, each had its peace. On one side, a gracious act of conflict resolution among the heads of inevitably murderous states (even, one way or another, military-less Costa Rica). On the other, a riotous cry for an end to injustice and bloodshed.

But I should have expected what happened. Well in time for the actual arrival of the men, as I listened to (and recorded) a long speech about the tragedy of politics from a Honduran photographer, the protests calmly faded away. I didn’t see if it was police or simply being finished that did them in, though I suspect some eerie combination of the two. The air was clear and quiet for, not too long after, the arrival of the powerful.

We stayed only for the appearance by Roberto Micheletti, the leader of the Honduran coup, flanked by Arias. Micheletti spoke—something about elections and the rule of law—but I watched Arias intently. He has a wonderful expression on his face, apparently always. So sad, so stern, so mournful. Whatever he is, for whatever it could possibly be worth, he does look like he carries all the suffering of the world in his expression, as one perpetually in the presence of futility, either right there before him or, at least, during a fleeting moment of progress, in the corner of his eye.

But I don’t know if that’s worth anything at all. I didn’t even get a good picture of him. And I still have to read all the papers to figure out what’s (really, factually, politically) going on, and who I think is on the brave side of right and peace and justice, which is the only peace. On the evening Costa Rican newscast, it goes without saying, only one of the two performances appeared. Only one event, apparently, really happened.

(Photos and video are mine, not Lucas’s, by the way.)

Twelve members of Greenpeace were arrested for hanging a banner on South Dakota's Mount Rushmore yesterday to protest global warming as the G-8 summit in Italy begins.

• Twelve members of Greenpeace were arrested for hanging a banner on South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore yesterday to protest global warming as the G-8 summit in Italy begins.

• Dozens of activists from 18 countries scaled smokestacks and occupied four coal-fired Italian power plants, hanging banners that called on the G8 summit in central Italy to take the lead in fighting climate change. Meanwhile, 15 environmentalists shed their clothes at the Spanish Steps in Rome.

• Up to 30 campaigners have dug themselves in at the Mainshill Wood Scottish Coal site in Douglas, Scotland to protest development of an open cast mine.

• Thousands took the streets of Lima, Peru yesterday for the second day of a national strike led by unions and civil groups to protest the free-market policies of President Alan Garcia.

• Students, indigenous leaders and environmentalists from around Australia gathered yesterday at the head office of a mining company in Melbourne to protest plans to open a new uranium mine.

• More than a hundred people marched in Washington yesterday to protest the Chinese government’s rough treatment of ethnic Uighurs in western China, where a reported 156 died during a clash with police on Sunday. Although, Uighurs believe that number to be much higher.

• 70,000 South African construction workers began an indefinite strike on Wednesday, halting work at stadiums for the 2010 World Cup, to demand for a pay raise.

• Hundreds of employees of Yemenia Airline gathered outside the French embassy in the Yemeni capital yesterday to protest French “ambiguity” over the crash of one of its planes last week.

• Fifteen demonstrators were arrested in front of the governor’s office in Sacramento, California yesterday when they refused to leave their protest against potential budget cuts to departments that serve the disabled.

On July 10th, 1943, Etty Hillesum, a young Dutch Jewish woman interned in Westerbork, sent yet another of her deeply thoughtful letters. In this particular letter, sent to a dear friend, she writes:

It is not fear of Poland that keeps me from going along with my parents, but fear of seeing them suffer. And that, too, is cowardice.

This is something people refuse to admit to themselves: at a given point you can no longer do, but can only be and accept. And although it is something I learned a long time ago, I also know that one can only accept for oneself and not for others.

I have never been able to “do” anything; I can only let things take their course and if need be, suffer. This is where my strength lies, and it is a great strength indeed. But for myself, not for others.

Hillesum, who was only 29 years old when she died in Auschwitz in November of that same year, determined that she would be the “thinking heart of the barracks.” In her journals and letters, which are now published for English readers in Etty: The Letters and Diary of Etty Hillesum, 1941 – 1943, we find a daunting yet luminous account of how to respond humanely to a culture of death. Hillesum invites her reader into the daily work and struggle of a life devoted to authentic hope, compassion for others, and a courageous engagement in nonviolence.

In November of 2000, I participated in a Bearing Witness retreat sponsored by the Zen Peacemaker Order in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. In a quiet and solitary moment, I knelt on the grounds of Auschwitz and asked Etty to be my teacher and guide, for I was on her ground now. Read the rest of this article »

In the above video, Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies does a good job explaining why we know so little about the protests in Iran. For all YouTube, Facebook and Twitter have done to bring us information and images from the streets, they can’t replace the accuracy and context of strong on-the-ground international media coverage—which, of course, has been banned. As a result, it’s hard to say whether the crisis in Iran is being fomented by a democratic uprising or, more simply, by a split within the ruling elite.

It’s almost certainly a bit of each, but mainstream Western media outlets have been pushing the former. Both the Times of London and the Wall St. Journal published articles this week about the opposition finding new and creative ways to protest amidst the crackdown. As much as we love reading about that sort of stuff here at WNV, it’s always a bit odd to see conservative papers supporting protesters. I suppose that’s why voices on the left, within the independent media, have surfaced with accusations of meddling by the US government and imperialism through nonviolence.

While there may be legitimate reason for such speculation, it’s clear the protests have taken on a mind of their own. It’s just too bad we can’t fully understand what that mind is thinking.

Anti-torture activists hung banners over a Berkeley pedestrian bridge on July 4th.

• Thousands of Zeleya supports took to the streets for the ninth straight day, with protests reported in cities across Honduras.

• Hundreds of Palestinian children participated in a rally in the Gaza Strip, where they chanted slogans against the Israeli embargo and waved banners calling for an end to the blockade.

• Hundreds of peaceful anti-globalization activists gathered in Rome to oppose the G8 summit, but were largely overshadowed by reports of violent protesters.

• Immigrant detainees have been staging on and off hunger strikes at a Texas detention facility for a couple months to protest conditions.

• The Congress of South African Trade Unions is launching a boycott against products from farms where workers are assaulted, harrassed, and exploited.

I received an email this morning from Bi’lin’s Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements telling me about a 3 am attack on their village by approximately 100 Israeli soldiers and border police. Homes were raided and two residents were arrested, including one American activist. The invaders eventually retreated, however, when a group of Palestinian, Israeli, and international nonviolent activists, numbering close to 100, started following them around the village and blocking their attempts to enter more homes.

Unfortunately, such attacks are commonplace in Bi’lin. Over the past two weeks soldiers have broken into homes, where they have harassed small children and made nine arrests, including a 16 year old. This is done to discourage the popular nonviolent protests against the separation wall and expansion of illegal settlements. Internationals have aided in several “de-arrests” by stepping between soldiers and young persons about to be apprehended. But more help is needed. The Popular Committee is asking “Israeli and international activists to keep coming to the village in the following days, in order to resist further army invasions.”

While this desperate plea and news from half a world away reaches the inboxes of other activists and supporters like myself, most media outlets will be busy reporting on the death of a pop star. The New York Daily News is running a forty-page spread on the life and career of Michael Jackson, as if round-the-clock media coverage the past one and a half weeks has not been enough to sate anyone’s curiosity and interest.

Nevertheless, 1.6 million people registered to attend Michael Jackson’s funeral in Los Angeles today. Of those 1.6 million, only 17,500 were able to get the highly coveted ticket. I have a suggestion for those not able to attend the funeral: How about on Tuesday if we all call our Congress persons or the White House and ask that Israel desist from its attack upon the people of Bi’lin? That would amount to 1,582,500 calls on behalf of the people of Bi’lin and the nonviolent protest they have waged each Friday for the past three years. A day on which over a million people called on behalf of people who are waging a nonviolent struggle would be a day that could change the course of history for the better.

In Buddhist practice, it is only a matter of time before a student must come to terms with the “hungry ghosts” of his or her being. These ghosts—manifest in greed, jealousy, addictions and compulsions—are imagined as beings whose “mouth is the size of a needle, though their stomach is the size of a mountain.”  While their hunger is intense, they can never get enough food. In the compulsive media coverage over Michael Jackson—his exceptional talent notwithstanding—I often wonder what “hungry ghost” is devouring us? Further, as we are dragged to and fro in the frenzy of the coverage, what else is going on in the world that warrants our complete attention?

Gilad Atzmon, whose writing has been excerpted in the most recent edition of Adbusters, speaks to what demands our attention in his article, “The Terror Within.” Though he speaks to his Israeli countrymen and women, those of us in the United States—whose close to $3 billion annually in tax dollars and whose weapons were used, most recently, to kill close to 1,400 Gazans in just three weeks—may also wish to pay attention to what he says. Writing of the December 2008 – January 2009 attack upon the Gaza Strip, Atzmon states:

The IDF campaign in Gaza enjoyed the support of 94% of the Israeli people. They watched the carnage on their TV screens as one of the strongest armies in the world quashed women, elderly people and children. They saw blizzards of unconventional weapons burst over schools, hospitals and refugee camps. And yet they didn’t do much to stop their ruthless ”democratically elected” leaders. Instead, some of them grabbed a seat and settled on the hills overlooking the Gaza Strip to watch the army turn Gaza into a modern Hebraic Colosseum of blood. Even now when the campaign seems to be over and the scale of carnage in Gaza has been revealed, the majority of Israelis fail to show any signs of remorse … This level of group barbarism cries for an explanation. How is it that a society has managed to lose its grip of any sense of compassion and mercy?”

In early January of 2009, the US Congress resolved overwhelmingly to support Israel to defend itself from attacks coming from the Gaza Strip (House) and to defend itself from terrorism (Senate). Ira Chernus, in his article, “Israelis Get the Truth about the Gaza Attack,” speaks to why our Congress would do well to add “wisdom” to the “sense of compassion and mercy” Atzmon advocates:

The justification Israel offers is the increased firing of rockets from Gaza. But Israelis can read that Hamas is responding to Israeli provocation. “Six months ago Israel asked and received a cease-fire from Hamas. It unilaterally violated it. On November 4, an Israeli operation sparked a new round of dangerous, if controlled, violence, when it unnecessarily bombed a tunnel.

About the same time, Israel cut off transport of food, medical supplies, and electricity to Gaza. Food insecurity in Gaza currently runs at 56 percent and is deteriorating rapidly, 42 percent of the Strip’s population is unemployed and 76 percent is receiving humanitarian assistance (all UN figures). A million and a half human beings  live in the conditions of a giant jail.

The Congressional vote, in other words, lacks intellectual honesty and integrity. Further, like the Israeli population described by Aztmon, there seems to be no remorse for those who were killed even though we supported the effort with the Congressional vote, with our tax dollars and with our weapons. How is it that the rockets launched by Israel and the United States are any less “terroristic” than those launched by Hamas and other armed groups? Tom Cordaro, in his book, Be Not Afraid: An Alternative to the War on Terror, offers one explanation. When writing about the “terrorism of the strong”, i.e. nation-states, he notes (with specific reference to the United States):

Because those who engage in the terrorism of the strong often have at their disposal many social, economic, cultural, and political levers of institutional power, they can commit their acts of terrorism under the guise of legitimacy and legality. This might explain why the FBI’s definition of terrorism includes the caveat that terrorism is the “unlawful use of force or violence.” Or why the State Department’s definition restricts terrorism to “sub-national groups or clandestine agents,” conveniently eliminating the possibility of nation-states, like the United States, might be guilty of terrorism.

The Popular Committee of Bi’lin, as well as other Palestinian and Israeli peace activists, believe that the attack upon the Gaza Strip is a harbinger of what’s to come for those Palestinians living in the West Bank. This is one reason why, among others, that we must pay attention to what’s happening right now in Bi’lin and to support the nonviolent efforts of its people. On Tuesday, let’s be one of those 1.5 million people to make that call to our Congress people and the White House—or creatively organize—on behalf of the people of Bi’lin. It is certainly a meaningful way to honor all of those who have struggled and who continue to struggle to “count” as a human being and who strive to bring about justice and peace for all.

• The Honduran public prosecutor’s office is investigating the deaths of two protesters shot in a scuffle with armed security forces at the airport in Tegucigalpa on Sunday, where tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered to await the arrival of ousted president Manuel Zelaya.

• Peru’s largest labor union has called for a national protest from July 7-9, demanding the resignation of President Alan Garcia’s Cabinet, the repeal of decrees Garcia issued to implement a US free trade pact and an independent investigation into the June 5th clash between police and striking Amazonian Indians. Garcia responded by authorizing the military to intervene in all labor and social protests this week.

• A logging crew turned back Monday after they were confronted by about 30 protesters who had erected barricades blocking the road to a timber sale in Oregon’s Elliott State Forest.
  

• Transport groups in the Panay and Guimaras regions of the Philippines will go on a two-day strike next week to protest continued increases of oil prices and a controversial government order that significantly raises fines for traffic violations beyond the earnings of most drivers and operators.

• Although they never intended to set foot in Israel, the eight Free Gaza activsts who were apprehended at sea by the Israeli navy last week and then jailed in Jeruslam have been deported.

• Thousands of electricians went on strike around Ireland on Monday to protest government and employer efforts to cut pay during a record recession.

• Almost half of the more than 3,000 South African Broadcasting Corporation workforce is expected to start protest actions over wage disputes this week.

More than 1,000 British activists encircled a power station in Kent to protest plans for a new coal-fired plant.

• Social workers in Jerusalem are planning to go on strike in protest of a spate of violent attacks by clients and the state’s failure to protect them.

• Hundreds of Chinese homeowners protested outside government offices in Shanghai demanding refunds after a 13-story apartment building in a complex under construction toppled over.

• Scores of Jordanian trade unionists and politicians attempted to stage a sit-in before the Agriculture Ministry to protest the import of products from Israeli settlements, but were dispersed by police with reports of some being beaten.

• Hundreds attended the 23rd annual Fourth of July Music Festival near the site of last week’s anti-coal protest in West Virginia. Organizers hoped to raise awareness about the negative effects of strip mining.

• Tens of thousands of protesters staged a demonstration in Niger on Sunday against President Mamadou Tandja’s planned referendum to decide whether he can run for a third term.

• Lecturers went on strike in London’s East End over the axing courses that will hit hundreds of students learning English as a second language.