Summer of Hell in Syria |

Read my post of Thursday, July 19 in the blog of CODEPINK: Women for Peace:

Summer of Hell in Syria | PINKtank


'via Blog this'

A Neighborhood Destroyed

I recently read the book, Crawfish Bottom: Recovering a Lost Kentucky Community by Douglas A. Boyd, portraying a "slum" neighborhood that was destroyed for and by urban renewal  in my small city of Frankfort, Kentucky.

Crawfish Bottom, later known as "Craw" or "The Bottom," was a low-lying swampy area next to the Kentucky River. It was inhabited by both African-Americans (the majority) and whites. It often flooded. Craw included institutions, such as churches and a school, for most of the black community of Frankfort.

Craw had a rough reputation, though. It did include and had a history of murders, bootlegging, and prostitution. As a middle-class white girl growing up in Frankfort, Craw, for me, was a place to not go.

When the powers that be of Frankfort decided that it was time for Craw to be gone, urban renewal commenced to destroy the neighborhood and replace it with a monumental governmental project (boondoggle?). From 1958 through the 1960's, Craw was destroyed and replaced with a huge concrete complex that included space for retail shops, a state office building, and a hotel. It was lovely and impressive to see. (A flood wall was added to help make all this viable.)

Trouble was the residents of Craw were not really taken into account. There were public discussions, but they were not really listened to. Some who owned their homes did not want to sell them. The residents were given promises of much better housing, but the promises were not kept. A real community was broken up. Neighbors and friends were separated by the destruction. They had lived in a place where people knew each other and helped each other.

The irony of all this is that the Capital Plaza never really worked as a public space. Retail did not last very long in its set-aside spaces and the concrete was too hot in the summer to really work well for events. The hotel has worked rather well, but the Capital Tower state office building is deteriorating. Most of the plaza is now deteriorating, crumbling, and may be on the way out to be replaced by something else.

Soon after I read the book Crawfish Bottom, I heard public radio's On Being, present its program, "Evolving a City." (The website with audio, transcript, and more is here.) In that program, host Krista Tippett interviewed evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson. Wilson was the author of a book entitled, The Neighborhood Project: Using  Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, about his work with his own small city of Binghamton, New York.


In the book and interview Sloan described urban renewal in ways opposite from those used for Craw in my city. He especially spoke in terms of using and fostering "pro-social behavior." He even has 12 Steps to a Better Neighborhood.

I can relate all this to my American foreign policy concerns. I have been distressed by our empirical behavior and our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think of all the destruction we have caused and our killing and displacement of large swaths of population. I also think of our support of the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories with its accompanying conflict. The Israelis displace the Palestinians, destroy their homes, and take their lands. (They kill them and incarcerate them, too, even children.)

Currently, in Japan there are high-level peace talks going on regarding Afghanistan. There is a representative of Pres. Harmid Kazai's government, there is even a representative of the Taliban, but it seems there may not be a woman present. Women need to be at the table. Lisa Savage, CODEPINK local coordinator for Maine, has a great article on the status of Afghan women and why they need to be there.

At CODEPINK.org, readers can learn about and  take action regarding these foreign policy issues and concerns. While there, please also help prevent a future war with Iran.


It seems to me that the world is a neighborhood and we should look at it that way. Actually, it is a neighborhood of neighborhoods. I believe we need to take David Sloan Wilson's thinking into account. We certainly need a new way  of thinking.


I also think CODEPINK's mission statement fits in very well:

CODEPINK is a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement working to end U.S. funded wars and occupations, to challenge militarism globally, and to redirect our resources into health care, education, green jobs and other life-affirming activities.

David Sloan Wilson's 12 Steps Toward a Better Neighborhood include this:

   4) Be inclusive.

Ideally, a neighborhood group should include everyone in the neighborhood. If someone doesn’t want to participate, it should be their decision and not because they weren’t asked. Small steering committees might be necessary, but everyone should feel that they have an opportunity for input, as in a democracy. 

In this week of American independence, let us be thankful, but let us also do some thinking about our interdependence.

I Declare World Peace.
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Intervention in Libya

I have been quite concerned about the revolution/civil war that is going on in Libya. I am on the side of freedom and human rights for the people of that country who have been oppressed for forty years by their leader. I am, however, not happy with the military intervention by the coalition that includes the United States.  I believe along with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that peaceful means bring peaceful ends. I do not believe that war is the way to peace. I believe along with the Quakers that War Is Not the Answer.

I have seen some articles by others that seem to feel this way.

CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin and journalist, Charles Davis have a piece entitled,  Instead of Bombing Dictators, Stop Selling Them Bombs. They write, “If the bitter lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan has taught us anything, though, it’s that wars of liberation exact a deadly toll on those they purportedly liberate – and that democracy doesn’t come on the back of a Tomahawk missile.” They tell us, the American taxpayers: “Instead of forking over $150 million a day to the weapons industry to attack Libya or selling $67 billion in weapons to the Saudis so they can repress not just their own people, but those of Bahrain, we – the ones being asked to forgo Social Security to help pay for empire – should demand those who purport to represent us in Washington stop arming dictators in our name.”

Richard Dawahare of Lexington wrote ‘Reality demands restraint’ for a blog on courier-journal.com. He concluded, “America should instead attend to the fallout of the continuing disaster in Japan, using our resources to help rebuild life, rather than reducing it in the sands of North Africa.” He also wrote a post on his own blog, The Peace Cow Field Journal, entitled, Attack on Libya seems right, is terribly wrong. “This smells like another neocon end-run using the veneer of humanitarianism as a smokescreen to hoodwink--ONCE AGAIN—an unwitting public,” he said there.

Alan J. Kuperman had a commentary,  5 things the U.S. should consider in Libya ,  in USA Today. Writing that intervening actually magnifies the threat to civilians in Libya and beyond, he wrote, “That is because armed uprisings, such as Libya's, typically provoke massive state retaliation that harms innocents.”  He listed five principles to guide humanitarian intervention, all of which apply to Libya.

An Atrocious Annivesary

March 19 marks the eighth anniversary of the uncalled for* U.S. invasion of the sovereign Middle Eastern nation of Iraq.

As a response, I post this of the The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Buddhist Order of Interbeing founded by the Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. The Mindfulness Trainings are also known as Political Precepts.

The Twelfth Mindfulness Training: Reverence for Life

 Aware that much suffering is caused by war and conflict, I am determined to cultivate non-violence, understanding and compassion in my daily life, to promote peace education, mindful mediation and reconciliation, within families, communities, nations and in the world. I am determined not to kill and not to let others kill. I will diligently practice deep looking with my Sangha [religious community] to discover better ways to protect life and prevent war.

This training or precept is not just for members of the Order of Interbeing but for every one of us who desires a more preaceful world and can enable us to say, "Never Again!"


______
*See the CODEPINK articles,  The U.S. War and Occupation of Iraq: What We Know, What We Don't Know and From 'Liberation' to Occupation: 10 Reasons Iraq Was No Cakewalk.

Quotes on Egypt and the Middle East

Yesterday I read two poignant pieces regarding Egypt and the Middle East.


The first one was the Monday forum on religion in USA Today. That piece was In Changing Egypt, Where Will Faith Fall? by Stephen Prothero. There Prothero based his piece on the thought of the twentieth century Protestant theologian, Rheinhold Niebuhr.


I give a quote from Prothero that I especially noted and  with which I certainly agree:

My prayer for America in our new age of digital politics — an age in which a tweet is worth far more than a thousand spoken words, and the "Google Guy" Wael Ghonim seems to wield as much power as (or more than) a head of state — is for some combination of modesty, exertion and wisdom.

I hope that our leaders will be modest enough to see how (and how often) what we have done or left undone in the Middle East has backfired on us. We have spent trillions of dollars and spilled untold blood in a seemingly endless effort to bring democracy, American style, to Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet Egyptians — citizens of a nation with more people than Iraq and Afghanistan combined — won the right to write their own future in just 18 days and with little to no U.S. help.

 The second piece yesterday I especially noted was by CODEPINK co-founder, Medea Benjamin who had attended protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt and while in Madison, Wisconsin to discuss her time in Egypt, attended the protest in Madison over collective bargaining rights for public workers. Her piece entitled, "From Cairo to Madison: Hope and Solidarity are Alive" was published in both CODEPINK's blog, PINKtank, and The Huffington Post. Benjamin noted that there was solidarity between the two protests. In Egypt there had been signs in solidarity with the workers in Madison and in Madison there were signs noting the protests in Egypt.  She included this:

Egyptian engineer Muhammad Saladin Nusair, the one whose photo supporting Wisconsin workers went viral, now has thousands of new American Facebook friends. He wrote in his blog that many of his new friends were surprised by his gesture of solidarity, but he was taught that “we live in ONE world and under the same sky.”

“If a human being doesn’t feel the pain of his fellow human beings, then everything we’ve created and established since the very beginning of existence is in great danger,” Muhammad wrote. “We shouldn’t let borders and differences separate us. We were made different to complete each other, to integrate and live together. One world, one pain, one humanity, one hope.”

Two Regions

I am still keeping an eye on the protests in the Middle East and North Africa while pulling for the people of those countries. I continue to pray for Freedom and Peace for all there. Democracy would probably be good for the region, too, but it would have to be a grassroots version and not one of our making. It also may take awhile to concoct. In trying to visualize the region, I found the map above that I thought might help others also. (You can click on it to view it better.)

I am also keeping an eye on what is happening in my home state of Kentucky whose General Assembly (legislature) is now in session. 

I am particularly interested in the eastern part of the state with its especially destructive brand of coal mining known as mountaintop removal (MTR).

This is really not that far off from what is going on in the Middle East and North Africa. In the Lexington Herald-Leader this morning, satirical columnist Larry Webster said that in the mountains the coal company Massey Energy is referred to as "Ole Massa." The coal companies have ruled Kentucky and especially its eastern portion dictatorially for years. They own both the legislature and the governor.

Kentucky writer Silas House  had an op-ed in the New York Times this morning in which he said:

The news media and the rest of the country typically think of mountaintop removal as an environmental problem. But it’s a human crisis as well, scraping away not just coal but also the freedoms of Appalachian residents, people who have always been told they are of less value than the resources they live above.

I also pray for Freedom and Peace for those in Kentucky and its eastern mountains. Democracy in Kentucky would be good, too.