The First Thanksgiving by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

This Thursday, the United States and its citizens around the world will celebrate our day of thanks, known as Thanksgiving. The tradition’s origins are often disputed. Some say it was a European harvest cycle tradition that immigrated to the “New World” with the explorers. Others dispute whether the tradition began in Plymouth, Massachusetts or in Florida or Virginia. Of course, the image of Native Americans sitting together with European colonists – actually, occupiers – is disputed as well.

Fast forward to today, and most dictionaries describe Thanksgiving as:

1) the act of giving thanks

2) a prayer expressing gratitude

3) a public acknowledgement of celebration of divine goodness

I am aware that the way we Thanksgiving is celebrated today runs contrary to the historic origins of the New World. There are so many Thanksgiving myths, and any actual story or history has been white washed. To make the holiday even more discouraging, the focus of Thanksgiving for so many Americans is on Black Friday, football, and holiday shopping. None of the dictionary definitions of Thanksgiving fit with contemporary consumerist and indulgent activities.

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Brian Terrell addresses a judge at Kansas City’s Municipal Court during a trial over a protest against nuclear weapons in 2010.

Standing in front of a judge is intimidating (to me anyway). It seems a whole lot easier to cross a line, refuse to move, or lie down in the middle of the street, than stand before a judge. I would rather be trussed up in handcuffs and crammed into a crowded police wagon than stand before a judge. They are often world-weary and judgmental (I guess it comes with the territory). I would rather stay in the grubby holding cell and drink the water that comes out of the little fountain on top of the stainless steel (seat-less) toilet than stand before a judge. They don’t really appear to be listening to what the people standing before them are saying. They often look out from heavy eye lids and one gets the sense that they think they have heard it all before. It is easier to hold a big sign or wear an orange jumpsuit or participate in street theater or leaflet the tourists or engage in conversation with an angry and alienated guy, than try and explain my motivations and thinking to a judge who I assume doesn’t have the time or interest to care.

I haven’t had a lot of chances to stand before a judge, but I am always really scared when I do. The most recent time, I emerged from more than 24 hours of “processing” in leg irons (I put “processing” in quotes to convey how much it sucked). We had been arrested early in the afternoon on January 11, 2008 at the Supreme Court, trying to unfurl a banner that said “Justice Denied.” In total, there were more than 90 of us inside the court building and on the steps outside, many dressed in orange jumpsuits and the rest wearing orange tee shirts under our jackets. Inside, after the banner was snatched away from us, we knelt down and began reading a statement together that described what men at Guantanamo had experienced of “U.S. justice.” We decided not to carry identification, symbolically and in a real way taking the names and identities of individual men at Guantanamo into U.S. courts and shedding some small bit of privilege and control that comes along with having a U.S. issued ID.

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Since last week’s “victory” against the tar sands industry, the question circulating among this growing climate movement has been, “What to do next?” When 350.org polled its supporters, twice as many people voted to fight oil and gas fracking than for any other cause.

While it’s hard to prioritize any one threat to the climate, there is a certain pragmatism to the fracking issue. Much like the tar sands and the process to approve the KeystoneXL pipeline, there’s a hard deadline fast approaching to approve drilling in the Delaware River Basin. At least there was, until an announcement was made today by the Delaware River Basin Commission that Monday’s planned vote in Trenton would be postponed indefinitely.

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Last Friday night, in a conversation with a longtime Occupy Wall Street organizer while walking (and skipping) toward an elusive Spokes Council meeting, we got to talking about violence. We’d done so before, always enjoyably; he’s a nimble conversationalist and well-dressed to boot. He’s also one of those in the movement who declares his openness to violent tactics if necessary. To him, the violence of state oppression ultimately justifies whatever means it might take to remove it. Revolutionary violence on the part of the oppressed is not really violence at all. Breaking windows is not violence. Nor, presumably, is a well-placed bomb.

As he sees it, a commitment to nonviolence only constrains a movement, preventing it from doing any meaningful resistance (despite the fact that Occupy Wall Street has effectively made just such a commitment). It was in explaining this that he reminded me of how, at Berkeley, the authorities described protesters locking arms as violent. If they can say that, he concluded, then nonviolence is by definition tantamount to passivity.

True—but only if we’re willing to accept the kind of wordplay that somehow passes muster at Berkeley.

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The heart of Plato’s Republic is a treatise on how humans are to organize themselves into a collective form of governance so as to best steer the ship of state. Five forms of government are posited—aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny—and philosophized about to determine which is most fit to govern the city. Lest we jump to quickly to conclusions, I’ll spoil the surprise for the high school seniors getting set to take on massive college debt to read Plato in freshman seminar: it’s not democracy.

So Plato—one of the most influential philosophers whose mentor (Socrates) was executed by the state—would not be a fan of Occupy Wall Street’s scathing critique of the corporate state? Hardly. He was just intimately aware of the dangers of majority (mob) rule as well as the tendency toward violence, repression, and injustice in timocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. His vote—pun intended—was for an aristocracy where the philosopher-king (sic) ruled. Democracy, for Plato, is dangerous because of the willy-nilly nature of the masses, whose opinions can sway as quickly as the winds blow. It was direct democracy, after all, that sentenced his mentor to death. And as poll after poll shows—from Presidential candidate primaries to Jay Leno’s infamous “Jay-walking”—America may not be ready for direct democracy a la Athenian style.

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• The Occupy Wall Street movement marked its two-month anniversary on Thursday with a series of actions in New York City, including a massive rally in Foley Square and march across the Brooklyn Bridge in which an estimated 32,000 people participated.  There were also major protests, which led to scores of arrests, in cities across the country, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Houston, Dallas, Seattle, St. Louis, Boston, Milwaukee, Nashville, Columbia (South Carolina), and Washington, D.C.

• Tens of thousands of people are rallying in Egypt today as part of the ongoing protests calling for a quicker transition from military to civilian government.

• In San Francisco, 95 protesters were arrested on Wednesday after occupying a Bank of America branch in the financial district. The demonstrators pitched a tent inside the branch before they were detained.

• Workers of Nigeria’s state-run power firm on Wednesday protested the deployment of armed troops to their offices across the country in the wake of an order by their union to launch a pay strike.

• Thousands of Kuwaitis stormed parliament on Wednesday after police and elite forces beat  up protesters marching on the Prime Minister’s home to demand he resign and calling for the dissolution of the parliament over corruption.

• On Tuesday, Palestinian activists describing themselves as ‘freedom riders’ were dragged by police off an Israeli bus they planned to ride into Jerusalem.

• As many as 10,000 students and Occupy activists overflowed UC Berkeley’s Sproul  Plaza on Tuesday night following a daylong classroom walkout and established a small camp in defiance of the university’s edict that no tents be erected.

• Student leaders in Colombia have called off a monthlong boycott of classes at public universities after the government met their demand to withdraw educational reform legislation.

• Some 1,000 Iranian students created a human chain Tuesday around the Isfahan uranium conversion facility to protest a recent UN report charging that Tehran may be developing nuclear weapons.

• More than 40 veterans of the Chornobyl cleanup have gone on hunger strike in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk to protest planned pension cuts.

Francisco “Pancho” Ramos Stierle–the Oakland activist and community organizer who was arrested while meditating on Monday outside City Hall–was released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last night. This comes as a major relief to the many friends and supporters who rallied in his defense against the threat of deportation to Mexico.

While Pancho is not completely out of the woods yet–he must appear before an immigration judge at a future date–the fact that he was released on his own recognizance is a positive sign. Even more positive, however, has been the outpouring of support. Over 8,000 people signed the petition that went up on Change.org Tuesday night and the outcry over his arrest and possible deportation continues to grow on Twitter–with names like Van Jones helping spread the message.

Shortly after his release, Pancho took part in a conference call, where he spoke about his time in custody “touching the hearts of all the people in the system which has failed.” By the sound of it, his few days in detention were not all that different than any other in his life–spreading warmth and kindness to those who don’t normally receive much.

This message, released by his lawyer earlier in the day, sums it up well:

Pancho wanted me to convey to folks that he was, for some reason, identified as a particularly dangerous inmate, wearing a red jacket in jail, and shackled so that the movement of his arms was restrained. The shackles were metal, and surrounded his waist. Apparently, this treatment is reserved only for the most “dangerous” inmates. It is unclear why Alameda County decided to place shackles on him. But after a short conversation, we agreed that, without a doubt, Pancho was the most dangerous person in Santa Rita Jail–dangerous to the system, and dangerous to the 1%. As Pancho reiterated, the most effective weapon against a system based on greed and violence is kindness.

Every experienced teacher knows that the line between the teacher and the taught can be a thin one. My students at the University for Peace’s main campus in Costa Rica come from Burma, Canada, Costa Rica, Fiji, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, the Philippine island of Mindanao, Pakistan, the United States, Vietnam and Zambia. Largely mid-career graduate students, they often bring experience in human rights and civil society organizations. One is a medical doctor who quit a postdoctoral program in healthcare administration because he decided that neither of these degrees would help him make a genuine difference in his country. The university—called UPEACE—may be the most multicultural institution of higher learning in the world, in terms of both faculty and students.

Why, one might ask, is it located in Costa Rica?

To make a long story short, Edgar Cardona, minister of security in the junta that ruled Costa Rica from May 8, 1948, to November 8, 1949, proposed the abolishment of the armed forces as a permanent institution. In December of 1948, the head of the junta, José Figueres Ferrer, later president of the country, declared that a nation that was not rich could not simultaneously afford good education, health care, and a military. The funds dedicated to the armed forces should instead be destined for education, Figueres said in a speech, and in a symbolic act handed the key for a military fortress to the minister of education. In November 1949, a new constitution recognized the ideal of “changing rifles into notebooks.” This perspective of valuing education over militarization has become part of the national memory and aspiration, to be materialized in UPEACE.

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This week, as the hammer was falling on Occupy sites across the nation—including in New York, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Portland—my friend and colleague Friar Louie Vitale heard that the Oakland police were about to storm Occupy Oakland for the second time in two weeks. He had just celebrated mass for some of those about to travel to Fort Benning in Georgia (for the annual witness at the School of the Americas) when he learned that the police action was imminent. He got a ride to Oscar Grant Plaza and headed to the Interfaith Tent where he joined fellow clergy in prayer and song and silence.

With a semi-circle of flickering votive candles at their feet, the religious leaders stayed put as the police assembled nearby. They sang “Amazing Grace” and “Down By the Riverside.” Mostly they kept vigil as the police cleared the site, dismantling scores of tents and rousting people from the plaza.

The Interfaith Tent was established some weeks ago to support and minister with the Oakland occupiers. Members take regular shifts and hold weekly planning meetings. Now they were taking this ministry to another level by being some of the last to occupy the plaza and by maintaining a peaceful and centered presence.

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Burma is now seeing it’s own version of the Occupy movement. On Tuesday, a group of monks staged an occupation of the Maha Myat Muni Pagoda in Mandalay, which is one of the most revered Buddhist sites in Burma. They made their presence and intent known by hanging large banners that read “We want freedom,” “Free all political prisoners” and “Stop civil war now.” Throughout the day they gave speeches to the expanding crowd of monks, civilians, and secret police. People donated water, food and other supplies and sent it up to the occupiers via ropes.

This protest comes at a crucial time as Burma’s ruling officials are trying to win over the international community into believing that real democratic reforms are happening. On Monday, there was expected to be an additional release of political prisoners, however, the releases never happened. Despite growing conflict and human rights abuses in the country, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) granted Burma a huge prize by announcing on Tuesday that Burma could take the chairmanship of the regional body in 2014. So Burma’s political prisoners stay locked up, and even more get detained. Since the elections last year, Burma’s political scene has been a mixture of minimal changes followed by brutalities against activists and ethnic minorities.

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