SEAC

From PolicyMic:

The capitalist economic system America operates under is not only unsustainable, but it distorts how Americans value their relationships with each other and the environment. Moreover, it simply is not working.

As a result, a new economic model is needed — one that fully honors our humanity, acknowledges our interdependence, respects Mother Earth, and is completely inclusive. One such model has informally existed since the beginning of our existence, and 25 years ago was formally reintroduced to the U.S.: time banking, a non-monetary system based on the amount of time people contribute to helping others. This helps rebuild the ties that keep communities together and allows everybody to participate in the community’s upkeep and improvement.

Our current economic model requires the continuous acquisition of increasing amounts of money. This system is deeply flawed and has been since its inception. In the past, it supported the violent acquisition of land belonging to well-established indigenous communities, as well as the abduction of millions of Africans from their native lands, whose labor was exploited and lives were utterly disregarded. This is similar to the plight of immigrants, undocumented workers, women, children, and uncounted victims of U.S. wars. Thus, the current statistics on the inequality in the distribution of wealth and disproportionate rates of poverty, unemployment, and homelessness should come as no surprise. In order to transcend these longstanding issues, an analysis of the system that contributed to them is required.

The emphasis capitalism places on money is a significant reason why it is so problematic. The U.S. paper fiat money is created out of thin air by the Federal Reserve and retains value only because we acknowledge it to have it. Additionally, since the fiat money is charged interest, which is drawn from taxpayer dollars and siphoned into private hands, inflation has become a permanent feature of our lives.

Using this paper fiat money as the tool responsible for meeting our everyday needs is “nonsense upon stilts” (a borrowed phrase from English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham). Moreover, in pursuit of money, the capitalist system pressures students to study subjects they have little interest in, employees to work exorbitant hours at jobs they get little satisfaction from, and for us all to adopt a competitive mindset that promotes competition over collaboration.

Simply put, we must change course.

Time banking is a money-less alternative with a straightforward concept: one hour of help providing a good or service for another earns onetime credit, which is exchangeable for an hour’s worth of help in return. For example, if I need my lawn mowed, instead of paying someone $50, the person who mows my lawn will receive one time dollar for every hour spent completing the service. The individual can then use the time dollar(s) to obtain other services or goods at an equivalent value. The transactions are recorded through an online website that uses an open-source code that will soon be available to smart phones and tablets as well.

A locally established time bank serves as the hub for all exchanges. Individuals are asked to enter information about themselves including their address, availability, what they can offer, what they would like to receive, etc. Once complete, transactions can begin. The time banking software has recently upgraded its software making it easier to log, track, and share hours, as well as document engagement, reliability, punctuality, and trustworthiness.

While individual time banking transactions help people meet needs and share skills, the system as a whole fundamentally changes the way of life for the participating community. Time banking requires community members to rely on one another, creating a culture of cooperation and trust. Since we all have something to contribute, time banking allows everyone to participate and pursue their curiosities, improving happiness, and stimulating creativity.

The time banking movement has been 25 years in the making and continues to be a work in progress. Time banks have been used in a variety of contexts, for example: the Time Dollar Youth Court (a juvenile diversion program), the National Homecomers Academy (challenging recidivism and improving reintegration into society for ex-cons), and CareBanks (a way of assuring health care for seniors).

There are 300 registered time banks in the U.S. with a total of 30,000 members. There are an additional 30,000 members in the UK and another 100,000 members throughout 34 other countries. In Washington, D.C., the founder of Time Banks USA, Edgar Cahn, has addressed both the Occupy DC camp and the Freedom Plaza group, and both encampments have started time banks of their own.

The time for an alternative economic model is long overdue. With this new wave of focused energy created by the Occupy movements, it is time to think outside of the box and discuss what we all want out of life and what it is that makes life truly worth living. As more people join the time banking movement, the scalability and range of services available for exchange will grow, along with our opportunity to live in a truly free and cooperative society.

To join a time bank near you, visit the Timebanks Community Directory

Source: Timebanking: New Economic Model For Those Tired With Capitalism

By: Yolo Akili

Oppression is trauma. Every form of inequity has a traumatic impact on the psychology, emotionality and spirituality of the oppressed. The impact of oppressive trauma creates cultural and individual wounding. This wounding produces what many have called a “pain body”, a psychic energy that is not tangible but can be sensed, that becomes an impediment to the individual and collective’s ability to transform and negotiate their conditions.

Emotional justice is about working with this wounding. It is about inviting us into our feelings and our bodies, and finding ways to transform our collective and individual pains into power. Emotional justice requires that we find the feeling behind the theories. It calls on us to not just speak to why something is problematic, but to speak to the emotional texture of how it impact us; how it hurts, or how it brings us joy or nourishment. Emotional Justice is very difficult for many activists, because historically most activist spaces have privileged the intellect and logic over feeling and intuition. This is directly connected to sexism and misogyny, because feeling and intuition are culturally and psychologically linked to the construct of “woman”, a construct that we have all been taught to invalidate and silence. So by extension we invalidate and silence the parts that we link to “woman” in ourselves: our feelings, our intuition, and our irrationality.

This disdain leads to many things: a dismissal or minimization of our own and other’s feelings, a fear of revealing oneself as “emotional” (instead of as sternly logical) and a culture of “just suck up your feelings” or shrug them off. All of these responses to our emotions have consequences that contribute to a range of emotional and spiritual stressors which impact our lives. In this article I am going to focus exclusively on the reasons I believe activist communities struggle with emotional justice and why the integration of our emotional selves into our activist work can’t wait.

Reasons I believe activist communities struggle with emotional justice

1. Activist Organizations Are Often Over-capacity

Many grass roots organizations and non-profits operate with a small staff that is expected to complete herculean tasks. This expectation leads to fatigue, stress and emotional imbalance. Asking to add emotional justice discourse(s) to the workplace/organizing is seen as a waste of time when organizations are trying to survive and fulfill grant/monetary obligations with limited resources. Yet it is an emotional discourse that could offer many movements opportunities for self-evaluation, especially as it relates to perpetuating models of capitalist productivity that they are often seeking to end. Regular guided dialogues and retreats must become a priority and should be led by outside consult. They can help build connections, clarify the mission(s) and re-invigorate the collective.

2. Emotional Justice Has No Succinct Time Line

There simply is no timeline that can be put on someone else’s healing. Within an emotional justice framework, someone is able to bring up their pain as they feel the need. Our patriarchal emotional discourses will push back against this, however, and will instead encourage us to deny, dismiss, and move on as quickly as possible from difficult emotions. Engaging emotional justice requires us to check this attitude within ourselves and develop ongoing strategies that allow us to express our concerns and feelings.

3. Emotions are Used as a Tool for those with Privilege to Avoid, Minimize or Escape Accountability

In an experience working with a group of queers on a racism project, a white identified cis gendered woman in the group would constantly break into tears whenever someone challenged her on the choices she was making that perpetuated racist themes. Her crying, which happened in several sessions, led to the entire group, especially the women of color, to comfort and assure her that she wasn’t a “bad person.”

Yet in the midst of attending to her emotional expressions, she continued to evade accountability and perpetuated the same dynamics. When she was challenged on her use of crying, she was able to come to an understanding that as a child crying had been a tactic she had used within her family to avoid being held responsible. This awareness led to her participate in the space in a much more accountable manner.

Stories like these happen all the time. Unfortunately in most spaces there are not always individuals with the skills to compassionately address these kind of emotional dynamics. This lack of skill prevents many from engaging emotional justice for fear they will get lost in these issues. This another reason seeking the support of healing justice/emotional justice educators is necessary.

4. Very Little Knowledge of the Emotional Body or Emotional Language

What is a feeling? What are the lessons they offer us? How can they invite us into ourselves? These are the questions that emotional justice guides us toward. Emotional justice can help many begin to work with their feelings in constructive ways that can help the movement as a whole. An example: If someone asks many activists, what do you feel? The response may be something like, “I feel like we just need to hurry up and make this thing happen because they keep on trying. yaddda yadda.”
But that was not a feeling. That was a thought. A feeling is one word. The feeling for this statement could be: “I am anxious, or I am frustrated”. Aiming directly for the feeling, as opposed to the thought around it, can help save time and address deeper issues. If feelings are continually confused as thoughts, then the intellectual debate process kicks in, and before you know it, we are battling for philosophical dominance instead of saying that we are hurt.

5. Lack of Self-Awareness into how our own unique Psychological Frameworks, Trauma and Social locations inform our Interpretation of Reality

Journeying into our own narratives and seeing how they inform our current understandings of others around us can be invaluable in times of challenge. There are many tools for this; one in which I find very effective is Psychological Astrology; as it invites us to explore, whether we believe in Astrology or not, what our motivations are, what we need to feel emotionally satisfied, the root of our personality conflicts with others, and how we express our aggression. This exploration can help us recognize an area of difference that is predicated on the ways in which we psychologically experience the world around us, a recognition that can help us understand and hear each other better in conflict situations.

6. Ideological Violence

“We were often poised and ready for attack, and not always in the most effective places. When we disagreed with one another, we were far more vicious to each other than the common originators of our problem. ” -Audre Lorde

It is apparent from Audre Lorde’s words that ideological violence was a big problem for her generation. Many years later it continues to be, as unproductive ego wars rage amidst our movement spaces.

These ego wars (or as many of my friends say, “intellectual dick fights”) are for many apart of the academic environmental training that encourages us to battle for philosophical dominance. While debate in itself is healthy and can be empowering, the challenge here is that this “training” is colored with patriarchy and a “power over others” construct. Tactics such as Interrupting, yelling, belittling each other, and personal attacks, are dynamics of patriarchal communication and must be seen as the acts of emotional violence that they are.* As this is acknowledged, steps must be taken to train and understand assertive communication and the myriad of cultural communication styles that allow us to express our hurt, rage and frustration in ways that minimize harm.

Emotional Justice is not anything new to our movements. It is already being enacted in many spaces and in organizations all across the country. My hope in writing this is that this work is expanded, illuminated and raised to a level of importance on par with our intellectual critiques. It is my hope that we realize that just as we must construct new systems and institutions, we must also develop new ways of relating with each other and to our emotional selves. These models of relating will call on us to develope skills and to work with our feelings, our trauma and our pain. It calls on us to recognize that emotional justice is an immediate need, not only for our movements, but for the world at large.

Yolo Akili is an Emotions Educator, Performance Artist, Practicing Astrologer, Yoga Teacher and long time activist. He can be reached at Yolo@yoloakili.com

Source: The Immediate Need For Emotional Justice

Occupy Wall Street and the hundreds of occupations it has sparked nationwide are among the most inspiring events in the U.S. in the 21st century. The occupations have brought together people to talk, occupy, and organize in new and exciting ways. The convergence of so many people with so many concerns has naturally created tensions within the occupation movement. One of the most significant tensions has been over race. This is not unusual, given the racial history of the United States. But this tension is particularly dangerous, for unless it is confronted, we cannot build the 99%. The key obstacle to building the 99% is left colorblindness, and the key to overcoming it is to put the struggles of communities of color at the center of this movement. It is the difference between a free world and the continued dominance of the 1%.

Left colorblindess is the enemy

Left colorblindness is the belief that race is a “divisive” issue among the 99%, so we should instead focus on problems that “everyone” shares. According to this argument, the movement is for everyone, and people of color should join it rather than attack it.

Left colorblindness claims to be inclusive, but it is actually just another way to keep whites’ interests at the forefront. It tells people of color to join “our” struggle (who makes up this “our,” anyway?) but warns them not to bring their “special” concerns into it. It enables white people to decide which issues are for the 99% and which ones are “too narrow.” It’s another way for whites to expect and insist on favored treatment, even in a democratic movement.

As long as left colorblindness dominates our movement, there will be no 99%. There will instead be a handful of whites claiming to speak for everyone. When people of color have to enter a movement on white people’s terms rather than their own, that’s not the 99%. That’s white democracy.

The white democracy

Biologically speaking, there’s no such thing as race. As hard as they’ve tried, scientists have never been able to define it. That’s because race is a human creation, not a fact of nature. Like money, it only exists because people accept it as “real.” Races exist because humans invented them.

Why would people invent race? Race was created in America in the late 1600s in order to preserve the land and power of the wealthy. Rich planters in Virginia feared what might happen if indigenous tribes, slaves, and indentured servants united and overthrew them. So, they cut a deal with the poor English colonists. The planters gave the English poor certain rights and privileges denied to all persons of African and Native American descent: the right to never be enslaved, to free speech and assembly, to move about without a pass, to marry without upper-class permission, to change jobs, to acquire property, and to bear arms. In exchange, the English poor agreed to respect the property of the rich, help them seize indigenous lands, and enforce slavery.

This cross-class alliance between the rich and the English poor came to be known as the “white race.” By accepting preferential treatment in an economic system that exploited their labor, too, the white working class tied their wagon to the elite rather than the rest of humanity. This devil’s bargain has undermined freedom and democracy in the U.S. ever since.

The cross-class alliance that makes up the white race.

As this white race expanded to include other European ethnicities, the result was a very curious political system: the white democracy. The white democracy has two contradictory aspects to it. On the one hand, all whites are considered equal (even as the poor are subordinated to the rich and women are subordinated to men). On the other, every white person is considered superior to every person of color. It’s democracy for white folks, but tyranny for everyone else.

In this system, whites praised freedom, equal opportunity, and hard work, while at the same time insisting on higher wages, access to the best jobs, to be the first hired and the last fired at the workplace, full enjoyment of civil rights, the right to send their kids to the best schools, to live in the nicest neighborhoods, and to enjoy decent treatment by the police. In exchange for these “public and psychological wages,” as W.E.B. Du Bois called them, whites agreed to enforce slavery, segregation, reservation, genocide, and other forms of discrimination. The tragedy of the white democracy is that it oppressed working class whites as well as people of color, because with the working class bitterly divided, the elites could rule easily.

The white democracy exists today. Take any social indicator—rates for college graduation, homeownership, median family wealth, incarceration, life expectancy, infant mortality, cancer, unemployment, median family debt, etc.—and you’ll find the same thing: whites as a group are significantly better off than any other racial group. Of course there are individual exceptions, but as a group whites enjoy more wealth, less debt, more education, less imprisonment, more health care, less illness, more safety, less crime, better treatment by the police, and less police brutality than any other group. Some whisper that this is because whites have a better work ethic. But history tells us that the white democracy, born in the 1600s, lives on.

The distorted white mindset

No one is opposed to good schools, safe neighborhoods, healthy communities, and economic security for whites. The problem is that in the white democracy, whites often enjoy these at the expense of communities of color. This creates a distorted mindset among many whites: they praise freedom yet support a system that clearly favors the rich, even at the expense of poor whites. (Tea Party, I’m talking to you.)

The roots of left colorblindness lie in the white democracy and the distorted mindset it creates. It encourages whites to think that their issues are “universal” while those of people of color are “specific.” But that is exactly backwards. The struggles of people of color are the problems that everyone shares. Anyone in the occupy movement who has been treated brutally by the police has to know that Black communities are terrorized by cops every day. Anyone who is unemployed has to know that Black unemployment rates are always at least double that of whites, and Native American unemployment rates are far higher. Anyone who is sick and lacks healthcare has to know that people of color are the least likely to be insured (regardless of their income) and have the highest infant mortality and cancer rates and the lowest life expectancy rates. Anyone who is drowning in debt should know that the median net wealth of Black households is twenty times less than that of white households. Only left colorblindness can lead us to ignore these facts.

This is the sinister impact of white democracy on our movements. It encourages a mindset that insists that racial issues are “divisive” when they are at the absolute center of everything we are fighting for.

To defeat left colorblindness and the distorted white mindset, we must come to see any form of favoritism toward whites (whether explicit or implicit) as an evil attempt to perpetuate the cross-class alliance rather than build the 99%.

The only thing that can stop us is us

Throughout American history, attacking the white democracy has always opened up radical possibilities for all people. The abolitionist movement not only overthrew slavery, it kicked off the women’s rights and labor movements. The civil rights struggle not only overthrew legal segregation, it kicked off the women’s rights, free speech, student, queer, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and American Indian movements. When the pillars of the white democracy tremble, everything is possible.

The only thing that can stop us is us. What prevents the 99% from organizing the world as we see fit is not the 1%. The 1% cannot hold on to power if we decide they shouldn’t. What keeps us from building the new world in our hearts are the divisions among us.

Our diversity is our strength. But left colorblindness is a rejection of diversity. It is an effort to keep white interests at the center of the movement even as the movement claims to be open to all. Urging us to “get over” so-called “divisive” issues like race sound inclusive, but they are really efforts to maintain the white democracy. It’s like Wall Street executives telling us to “get beyond” “divisive” issues like their unfair profits because if you work hard enough, you too can get a job on Wall Street someday!

Creating a 99% requires putting the struggles of people of color at the center of our conversations and demands rather than relegating them to the margins. To fight against school segregation, colonization, redlining, and anti-immigrant attacks is to fight against everything Wall Street stands for, everything the Tea Party stands for, everything this government stands for. It is to fight against the white democracy, which stands at the path to a free society like a troll at the bridge.

Occupy everything, attack the white democracy

While no pamphlet can capture everything a nationwide movement can or should do to undermine the white democracy and left colorblindness, below is a short list of questions people might consider asking in movement debates. These questions were developed from actual debates in occupations throughout the U.S.

1. Do speakers urge us “get beyond” race? Are they defensive and dismissive of demands for racial justice?
2. If speakers urge developing “close working relationships with the police,” do they consider how police terrorize Black, Latino, Native, and undocumented communities? Do they consider how police have attacked occupation encampments?
3. If speakers urge us to hold banks accountable, do they encourage us to focus on redlining, predatory lending, and subprime mortgages, which have decimated Black and Latino neighborhoods?
4. If speakers urge the cancellation of debts, do they mean for things like electric and heating bills as well as home mortgages and college loans?
5. If speakers urge the halting of foreclosures, do they acknowledge that they take place primarily in segregated neighborhoods, and do they propose to start there?
6. If speakers urge the creation of more jobs, do they acknowledge that many communities of color have already been in chronic “recessions” for decades, and do they propose to start from there?

Joel Olson is a member of Bring the Ruckus.

Source: Whiteness and the 99%

From Brer Rabbit Redux:

By: Matthew Johnson

In light of the grotesque execution of Troy Davis in Georgia, prompting even the New York Times to call for abolition, it is time to bury our current criminal justice system and the vulgar ideology that sustains it to ensure that not one more atrocity is committed by the state in the name of “justice.”

A friend and passionate activist/revolutionary from my hometown named Maria Allwine has co-written a draft policy statement representing the demands of the October 2011 Movement with regard to criminal justice. I offered to include an addition to the “solution” section, which I will post below. She does a fine job of presenting the problem, so I won’t regurgitate it here:

Most, if not all, arguments made in support of the current criminal “justice” system are cynical ones. Its defenders claim either that some people are too evil to live in society and must be incarcerated or executed as a matter of public safety or that there is no tenable alternative to the current system despite its flaws. In her small but compelling book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis points out that prisons (which I use here as a synecdoche) have become self-justifying: We need them because there are dangerous people locked up in them — or so the flawed logic goes.

Approaches that take into account the humanity of the alleged offender are often dismissed as naïve or inconsiderate to the victim, even though these approaches tend to give victims much more power than the current system. The oldest such approach stems from hunter-gather tradition, was codified in the 1970s by the Mennonite community, and is now referred to as restorative justice. Its success in New Zealand and even locations as proximate and violent as Baltimore, Md., would suggest that its critics are the naïve ones. While the Community Conferencing Center of Baltimore, which facilitates restorative conferences that include all parties to the conflict seeking to reach a shared agreement, boasts a 95 percent rate of compliance (post-agreement), a recent study examining the impact of disparate juvenile justice systems came out heavily in favor of a non-punitive model based on measures such as costs and recidivism rates and cites New Zealand for pioneering the “restorative approach to offending by young people.” Some see it as only a matter of time before a country like New Zealand takes a restorative approach to its entire criminal justice system.

It is difficult to give a concise definition of restorative justice given its many forms and the depth of its philosophical underpinnings. There is even some controversy among enthusiasts over whether to define it at all. Suffice it to say that it is generally concerned not with collecting facts, determining fault, or laying blame but with repairing the harm done and moving beyond the victim/offender dichotomy in order to address the feelings and needs of all parties to the conflict.

Despite its ancient roots and modern success, restorative justice is not widely known. Yet due to the failures of the current justice system and the determination of its proponents, it is slowly entering the mainstream. Restorative processes as they relate to the workplace have become the subject of a new movie called Face to Face, and citizens across the United States are involved in study circles related to conflict resolution. Nonviolent Communic ation interest groups are but one example.

Although governments can and should take a leading role in promoting and financing restorative processes when and where crime occurs, the demand is such that small organizations and individuals are taking it upon themselves to change the status quo in their communities. Some have even gone a step further and developed a philosophy of justice called transformative justice  that takes into account the broader social circumstances that give rise to acts of interpersonal violence. Efforts by activists to apply transformative justice principles to conflict — particularly gender-based violence —within communities have cropped up in cities such as Oakland, Philadelphia, and (recently) Washington, D.C.

Source: Justice Or Just Ice? Toward A Restorative Approach

To my heroes who have supported me and my foundation over the years, I’d like to have you invite us back to your neighborhood to give us the opportunity to talk with your community to help us stop Mountaintop Removal.

Please click this link and fill out this form to invite me and/or one of our other moving speakers to your community to lead a speaking event:

http://mountainkeeper.blogspot.com/p/invite-larry-to-your-community-in-2011.html

We are making progress by leaps and bounds but we can’t continue to do this without your help.  We have more Coalfield Citizen Speakers than we’ve ever had before and they’re ready to lead a presentation in your community if you will invite them.

Paula Swearengin, is working two jobs as a mother of four who is ready to come to your community.  Sid Moye and Wendy Johnston are full time farmers who are forging a living off the land while fighting strip mining and are ready to come to your community.  Amber Whittington is a twenty one year old woman who is putting her life into making her community one that she can live in long term and is ready to come to your community.  All these people are coalfield residents and all these people are working with me to build our movement from the ground up.

We need your help to get the information out and your monetary support to keep our speaking tours running.  Most of all people I just want to thank you so very much for stepping up to the plate.  It’s not my fight to save Appalachia alone and let’s continue this fight together.

thank you,
Larry Gibson
Keeper of the Mountains

304-542-1134

Larry.Gibson@MountainKeeper.org

From Brer Rabbit Redux:

About five years ago, as an overachieving junior scholar-activist at the University of Maryland, I was in the midst of a rigorous application process that required me to complete pages of biographical inquiry, a series of short essays, several rounds of interviews, and a project proposal for societal change. This was for the Truman Scholarship, a prestigious national award given to “college juniors who show leadership potential and have an interest in government or public sector service.”

My project proposal was to transform the national education system into one befitting of a democracy. I cited Chomsky’s writing on the Trilateral Commission and the liberal elite’s stated goal to make education less democratic in order to stave off unrest like that which occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s and argued that rather than seeking to prevent social upheaval through indoctrination, a democratic society through its system of education should seek to promote free thought and self-critical analysis with the aim of strengthening democracy.

Needless to say I did not win. I did not make it past the gatekeepers — political science professors (do I dare call them liberal elites?) at my own university who insisted that I was too anti-government for such a scholarship and that, among other things, I was an “uneducated radical.” I have only just begun to appreciate the irony of this evaluation.

I suppose that if I had been educated like those old white men on the other side of the conference table, I would critique the police in London for showing too much restraint in dealing with the so-called rioters as the Washington Post and the New York Times appeared to do on Aug. 10 and 11 respectively. Our lovely (dare I call it liberal elite?) media went on to question where the parents were of these youthful rioters, who complained of racism and a lack of opportunities for social advancement. Boo hoo! was the response to this along with the killing of an unarmed black man by white officers, and silence was the response to the subsequent beat-down of unarmed protesters seeking redress. In short, the liberal elite stands for nothing but the status quo, and they want you, the naive, vagabond “uneducated radicals,” to join them in their cynical stand for injustice.

Moreover, as I write this on the 48th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, this same elite wants you to think the man who called the U.S. government the “greatest purveyor of violence” while denouncing the war on Vietnam was merely a great civil rights leader.

Perhaps if I had studied like a good boy, I would have more respect for authority and would not question my own government’s use of force against not only peaceful protesters in the 1960s and beyond, but also against such enemies of the state as the homeless and disabled Dwight Harris who was slammed face first onto a steel grating by two officers without provocation. I might have determined that the BART police’s unprecedented decision to shut down wireless communications to cover the shame of another unjustifiable killing was just another necessary step to curb a serious “excess in democracy,” to quote the 1975 Trilateral Commission report, whose American contributor was the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, former head of the Department of Government at Harvard (an educated radical?).

It’s too bad that as part of my education I did not sit in on monotonous lectures delivered by Huntington’s ghost at the University of Maryland (not quite Harvard, I’ll admit). I preferred the living, breathing form of Dorith Grant-Wisdom, who was laid off last year for daring to specialize in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that “nothing ever happens in,” according to Huntington’s contemporary Henry Kissinger. If I had schooled myself in Huntington’s philosophy, I would not have to question the underpinnings of our government’s direct military involvement in six Muslim countries or the legality of the FBI’s counter-Muslim activities, for it would be the consequence of the inevitable “clash of civilizations” that pits culture against culture in a cynical world of us vs. them. I would merely have to take a side. And I certainly would not have the gall to propose the democratization (liberalization?) of education, which would lead future generations to challenge such a myopic world view.

In summary I am proud to be an “uneducated radical” if educated in the realm of academia and manufactured public opinion is code for sharing the views of the elite. What I once took as an insult I will now take as a compliment and will thank the bearded, crusty old professor who bestowed it upon me with a liberal sprinkling of condescension.

I’m an ‘Uneducated Radical’… Join me!

Picture this: ten young West Virginians carrying a 350-lb fiberglass giraffe through the grounds of a community center in a low-income neighborhood in the Chemical Valley.  It’s a bizarre sight – and it certainly isn’t what the socially-conscious participants expected when they signed up for a summer with Build-It-Up! West Virginia, to build infrastructure and expand the capacity of long-term community-run sustainable economic projects in the coalfields.

But Build-It-Up! exists for a bigger reason: to work in solidarity with communities.  For centuries, missionaries, extractive industries, volunteers and other outsiders have come to West Virginia to “fix” the state, without ever asking what – if anything – needs fixed.  Build-It-Up! makes the extra effort to work with community members, listen to people’s stories, and otherwise assess the needs.  As we build infrastructure, we build trust as well.

“Even though you can’t see the economic improverishment right there in Rock Lake it is all around you, close around you.  This is one of the most economically poor areas in all of Charleston, like right where we’re working.  Not only are we fighting extractive industries, we are fighting an entire system that causes poverty within all areas, specifically West Virginia,” said Dustin Steele, a coordinator for Build-It-Up.  “So when you’re At Rock Lake, realizing that you’re creating and helping build back up a building that is going to help serve as a positive outlet for people to rise up and be empowered from this economic depression…you’re doing tangible, wide-reaching good in all of these communities.  Know that with every maddock you swing, every picnic table you paint, every board you carry out, you are doing a solid good, not only for the community, but for yourself.”

So why the giraffe?  Rock Lake Community Center, where we’re working this week, was a rock quarry, transformed into a swimming pool during the great depression.  The pool also holds historic significance as the site of multiple sit-ins during desegregation.  Community members – and even participants in Build-It-Up! – have shared childhood memories of the Rock Lake Pool or the amusement park, putt-putt course and arcade that later graced the site.  Many coalfield residents spent their childhood summers here.  (More info on the site’s history can be found here)

The community center got its feet off the ground this year with monthly open-mic nights that also serve as a forum for community members.  Suggestions from neighbors resulted in a huge, community-painted mural now prominent inside the old arcade, and now, with help from Build-It-Up! West Virginia, the minigolf course is being restored to its former glory, giraffe and all.  Participants will go door-to-door in the community to spread word of the progress at the center.  Over the next three weeks, volunteer engineers will transform ideas for minigolf obstacles collected from local teenagers into plans for Build-It-Up! to construct in our second week at the site.  That’s what good community organizing looks like – identifying real needs in a community that they can’t implement on their own, connecting the community to the needed resources, working in solidarity with them, and helping them build capacity.  And sometimes, it may just look like a fiberglass giraffe.

From PolicyMic:

NATO’s decision to intervene in Libya on humanitarian grounds has become an alarming and revealing assessment of America’s understanding of war. The way the “established” media portrayed the Libyan conflict, and its subsequent reception, illustrates our society’s failure to recognize how the power dynamics of plutocratic governance shape our realities. There is significant historical evidence that during times of war propaganda is used to justify military action for special interests. If we are to believe the theme of “change” will define our generation, we must pierce through both the media and the government’s rationalization of war.

I have found the established media’s reporting on Libya to be lacking in depth and consideration of an alternative to military intervention. This is not unusual. History repeatedly shows that during times of war, the established media have a tendency to mislead, deceive, and (in some instances) fabricate to serve the interests of the rich and powerful. This is shown through the writings of Carl Bernstein, the Nayirah testimony, the treatment of former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, and the beginning of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Essentially, the media has been used to facilitate consent, not dissent.

Given the assumption that we learn from history, our passive acceptance of such reporting is surprising. In 1758, author Samuel Johnson wrote, “Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.” Later, President Dwight Eisenhower warned us of the emerging military-industrial complex, which we learned has a tradition of lying in addition to tremendous governmental influence. If the military has to go to such lengths for approval, it is clearly not what we naturally desire. Thus, why has there not been more widespread skepticism and objection with regard to Libya?

Led by the U.S., NATO used reports of imminent danger to civilians as justification for humanitarian intervention. Yet, history shows that there is a good reason to approach this explanation with skepticism. In fact, it was recently reported that President Barack Obama exaggerated the humanitarian threat. Once we consider issues such as who the Libyan rebels are and what role oil, banking, previous planning, and geopolitics play in the situation, it seems that history is repeating itself.

The question for our generation becomes: At what point do we categorically reject war and its mechanisms from the beginning rather than in retrospect? We can do this by repudiating all war. We must reject the seemingly righteous theory of humanitarian intervention because it is divorced from how social conflicts actually arise and are resolved. The idea that bombing — an indiscriminate killing method the U.S. has become notoriously inaccurate at — can improve a situation is untenable. The most recent example is Kosovo; it was the nonviolent movement that ultimately resolved the conflict. Moreover, what right does any country have to determine the affairs of another country? This is the same expression of moral superiority used to justify imperialism.

If we want to live in a world of peace, we must learn from our history and see that war is an unnatural phenomenon; we need to reject it on a philosophical and spiritual level. Removing war from our conscience creates space for dialogue and diplomacy, and brings us closer to a shared utopia.

Link to original article