At a time when, in the United States, majority opinions—like the need for tax increases, military-spending cuts, clean energy, and campaign finance reform—don’t seem to even be on the table in Washington, when whole neighborhoods and cities seem to have fallen off the political map, one might find oneself wondering: Where did our democracy go?
Today at Religion Dispatches, I interview Princeton philosopher of religion Jeffrey Stout. (This is a guy to look out for. His 2007 talk on “The Folly of Secularism” is probably the only academic lecture that has brought tears to my eyes.) We talked about about his latest book, Blessed Are the Organized, which came out last year—though it has been never been so relevant as now. Blessed Are the Organized is an unusual kind of book in academic philosophy; Stout dwells in stories more than theories, recounting his travels among people doing local grassroots organizing in cities around the United States.
In The Trumpet of Conscience, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. conjured up an apt metaphor of urgency and transformative engagement:
There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light… Or when a [person] is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed… Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.
Four decades on, his words are as sharp and appropriate as ever.
Dr. King evokes the image of a world on fire. This fire burns on today, at a time of permanent war, the growing economic divide, threats to civil liberties, ecological devastation, and the structural violence of racism, sexism, and homophobia. We can continue to opt for the raging spiral of violence and injustice, or we can band together to build democratic, multiracial, and nonviolent societies where the dignity of all is respected and the needs of all are met.
This will not come easily, Dr. King suggests. This will be risky work.
The still-smouldering Carpetright store in Tottenham. (Photo: Guardian)
Rioting and rampages spreading across English cities have caused severe property destruction and raised public alarm. Writing in London’s Guardian, community organizer Stafford Scott describes how he was among the group that on August 6th sought information from the police in Tottenham, a poorer section of London. They wanted an official statement on whether Mark Duggan had been killed by police bullets, as had been reported in the news.
All we really wanted was an explanation of what was going on. We needed to hear directly from the police. We waited for hours outside the station for a senior officer to speak with the family, in a demonstration led by young women. A woman-only delegation went into the station, as we wanted to ensure that this did not become confrontational. It was when the young women, many with children, decided to call it a day that the atmosphere changed, and guys in the crowd started to voice and then act out their frustrations.
This event is what most media accounts have identified as the spark that set England on fire, which has caught the world by surprise. Yet, says Scott, “If the rioting was a surprise, people weren’t looking.”
It’s a bit odd to me that with my sense of geographical direction I’m ever regarded as a leader to guide groups in foreign travel. I’m recalling a steaming hot night in Lahore, Pakistan when Josh Brollier and I, having enjoyed a lengthy dinner with Lahore University students, needed to head back to the guest lodgings graciously provided us by a headmaster of the Garrison School for Boys. We had boarded a rickshaw, but the driver had soon become terribly lost and with my spotty sense of direction and my complete ignorance of Urdu, I couldn’t be any help. My cell phone was out of juice, and I was uncertain anyway of the needed phone number. I bumped and jostled in the back seat of the rickshaw, next to Josh, as we embarked on a nightmare of travel over unpaved, rutted roads in dizzying traffic until finally the rickshaw driver spotted a sign belonging to our school – the wrong campus, we all knew – and eager to unload us, roused the inhabitants and hustled us and our bags into the street before moving on.
We stood inside the gate, staring blankly at a family that had been sound asleep on cots in the courtyard. In no time, the father of the family scooped up his two children, gently moving them to the cot he shared with his wife so that Josh and I would have a cot on which to sit. Then he and his spouse disappeared into their humble living quarters. He reappeared with a fan and an extension cord, wanting to give us some relief from the blistering night heat. His wife emerged carrying a glass of tea for each of us. They didn’t know us from Adam’s house cat, but they were treating us as family – the celebrated but always astonishing hospitality that we’d encountered in the region so many times before. Eventually, we established with our host that we were indeed at the wrong campus, upon which he called the family that had been nervously waiting for our errant selves.
This courtyard scene of startling hospitality would return to my mind when we all learned of the U.S. Joint Special Operations (JSO) Force night raid in the Nangarhar province, on May 12, 2011. No matter which side of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border you are on, suffocating hot temperatures prevail day and night during these hot months. It’s normal for people to sleep in their courtyards. How could anyone living in the region not know this? Yet the U.S. JSO forces that came in the middle of the night to the home of a 12-year-old girl, Nilofer, who had been asleep on her cot in the courtyard, began their raid by throwing a grenade into the courtyard, landing at Nilofer’s head. She died instantly. Nilofer’s uncle raced into the courtyard. He worked with the Afghan Local Police, and they had told him not to join that night’s patrol because he didn’t know much about the village they would go to, so he had instead gone to his brother’s home. When he heard the grenade explode, he may well have presumed the Taliban were attacking the home. U.S. troops killed him as soon as they saw him. Later, NATO issued an apology.
Speaking just weeks before his assassination, which catalyzed rioting across America, Martin Luther King offered his thoughts on the type of civil unrest that devolves into violence and looting, saying:
It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.
If there’s any question—in this time of deep spending cuts and high unemployment—as to whether the same can be said about the riots plaguing parts of London these past four days, one need only look at where they are occurring.
Ever since Burmese resistance leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released from her house arrest last year by the ruling military junta, I have been trying to understand why she hasn’t given the people of Burma any clear calls for acts of resistance. For Burmese people around the world opposed to the regime, she is an unparalleled source of spiritual authority. Lately, I’ve been thinking of this especially in light of her recent Reith Lectures, which were controversial for her statements that the movement may possibly have to be violent as well as nonviolent. Why would she say this? Is it a tactical threat to the regime? Or is it part of her grand strategy to embrace armed ethnic nationalities? Having been a part of the effort to rid Burma of its oppressors since the nationwide uprising in August of 1988, I took this as a shock. She hadn’t ever spoken quite like this.
Gandhi's image on the Indian rupee is a sign that the world has much to learn about his idea of economics.
On Monday the Dow Jones industrial average fell 634.76 points; the sixth-worst point decline for the Dow in the last 112 years and the worst drop since December 2008. Every stock in the S&P 500 index declined.
It is easy to blame bipartisan bickering for the impasse that led to Standard & Poor’s downgrading of the American debt, and in turn the vertiginous fall of the Dow. This bickering—this substitution of ideology for reason, of egotism for compassion and responsibility on the part of lawmakers—is a national disgrace; but while it failed to fix the problem, we must realize that it did not cause it. The cause—and potential for a significant renewal—lies much deeper.
So let’s allow ourselves to ask a fundamental question: what’s an economy for?
Ten people were arrested Monday after blocking the road to the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort near Flagstaff in an attempt to prevent construction on a new snowmaking system out of sewage that they say will defile a mountain held sacred by all the region’s indigenous people.
About 125 people gathered outside Speaker of the House John Boehner’s office in West Chester, Ohio on Tuesday to demand more jobs for people in his district.
Dozens of Togolese journalists marched in the capital, Lomé, on Saturday to call attention to reported allegations that government security agents planned to retaliate against critical reporters.
So much of the ugliness that the American wars have brought into the world over the past decade has been invisible, hidden from view by being unrecorded, unremembered, redacted, spun, censored, or glorified. For those not in the way of falling bombs and night raids, or those whose families haven’t been torn apart by deployment after deployment, the wars have been easy enough to ignore. We’ve all seen enough, though, to know better. We should know that this ugliness hasn’t done, and cannot do, any good. Yet the ugliness has, as a whole, left Americans discouraged and irresolute. Maybe it will take beauty to finally show people the courage to pay attention and act.
That’s the idea behind 10 Years and Counting, a new initiative hatched in the Adirondack compound of the Blue Mountain Center, an activist and artist residency community nestled beside a high-country lake. 10YAC’s goal is this: between September 11th and October 7th of this year—marking the 10-year anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks and the start of the war in Afghanistan—launch an artistic groundswell by coordinating protest and arts events around the country. Their network includes activist groups, including Code Pink and the War Resisters League, as well as arts organizations and galleries. To see some of the visual art, poetry, music, and performances they’ve been gathering, take a look around the 10YAC blog.
But art, for 10YAC, is not quite an end in itself. “One of the most important visions” of the project, according to Alice Gordon, program director at Blue Mountain, is to see “as many Americans as possible getting onto the streets for peace around the anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan.”
The next round in the fight against mountaintop removal is underway. With Alpha Natural Resources—a leading coal producer in the US—seeking to renew a strip mining permit, activists have been doing all they can to rally opposition ahead of tonight’s public hearing.
The most visible sign of protest has been what some are calling a “historic tree-sit,” which began on July 20, when a couple activists with the group Radical Action for Mountain People Survival ascended two trees, setting up camp on platforms approximately 80 feet off the ground. One of them has been there ever since, while the other left after 13 days. The latter spoke about her experience in the following video:
Tree-sitting has become a fairly common tactic for those fighting mountaintop removal since it stalls mining activities and gives activists on the ground time to pursue legal recourse. As a long-term strategy, however, it can be limited—particularly to the length of time a person can endure life in a tree. Julia Butterfly Hill famously lasted 738 days. But generally, a month is a real accomplishment. That’s why it’s good MTR opposition isn’t limited to tree-sitting. As Jeff Biggers reported for Alternet:
At a time when, in the United States, majority opinions—like the need for tax increases, military-spending cuts, clean energy, and campaign finance reform—don’t seem to even be on the table in Washington, when whole neighborhoods and cities seem to have fallen off the political map, one might find oneself wondering: Where did our democracy go?
Ever since Burmese resistance leader Aung San Suu Kyi was released from her house arrest last year by the ruling military junta, I have been trying to understand why she hasn’t given the people of Burma any clear calls for acts of resistance. For Burmese people around the world opposed to the regime, she is an unparalleled source of spiritual authority. Lately, I’ve been thinking of this especially in light of her recent 
So much of the ugliness that the American wars have brought into the world over the past decade has been invisible, hidden from view by being unrecorded, unremembered, redacted, spun, censored, or glorified. For those not in the way of falling bombs and night raids, or those whose families haven’t been torn apart by deployment after deployment, the wars have been easy enough to ignore. We’ve all seen enough, though, to know better. We should know that this ugliness hasn’t done, and cannot do, any good. Yet the ugliness has, as a whole, left Americans discouraged and irresolute. Maybe it will take beauty to finally show people the courage to pay attention and act.