Summary board prepared in real-time at Randy Pierce's talk on blindness, TEDx Springfield
Summary board prepared in real-time at Randy Pierce’s talk on blindness, TEDx Springfield
Randy Pierce, an athlete who recently climbed Kilimanjaro, enjoys a spectacular view or a great sunset—even though he happens to be blind. Just because he can’t see it and has to have it described doesn’t mean he can’t enjoy. His talk was my personal highlight of the fourth annual #TEDxSpringfield yesterday.
Formerly sighted, he had lessons for anyone going through a difficult transition, not just losing sight. “The transition trauma moment is incredibly difficult…If we want to just live there, we can be paralyzed and stay there forever.” Anger and depression are perfectly normal when you lose something you’d always had, but it’s our choice about whether to remain stuck there, or use the trauma to springboard growth. He shared a powerful example of this from his own experience learning to use a blind cane.
While the blind cane was the tool that let me walk around safely, it was also my scarlet letter that let me feel less than, feel their pity, their lack of understanding…
In those early stages, you might be angry, depressed, enthused, in denial. I was all of those. I broke my cane and threw it away, focused on the risk management of how people would react to me… I accidentally knocked over a toddler [too low to the ground to enter Pierce’s sensory awareness] who didn’t have the warning of my cane. I let my vanity restrict me and it caused damage. A really good eye-opener on evaluating more of the risk and what is the right way to manage it.
Once, he asked if anyone was sitting in a bus seat, and hearing no response, plopped himself in the lap of a woman too shy to answer his query. And this, too, was a teachable moment for Pierce:
I can mitigate the challenge of social interaction. I wear glasses so others are not upset by my eyes shaking back and forth. I could have said “if you’re sitting there, please say hello so I don’t sit in your lap,” instead of “is anyone sitting there?”
What he learned from these early experiences is that the risk of being rejected by others is a lesser risk than the risk of failing to connect with those who are ready.
Reach out and connect with people. Make it safe for them. Take a way the risk of rejection for THEM. But how much greater risk is isolation? Make the risk of a little rejection and understand that [not all will work out]. People look for the safety of the community they have in their pocket (phones). But think about how many lost future communities [never occur because we isolate ourselves in our phones and ignore the people around us].
Pierce choses a dynamic, almost Mandela-like optimism and a methodical approach. He achieved an athletic feats that trips up even 90 percent of sighted people: grabbing a moving trapeze and using it to ring a bell.
I have plenty of points of darkness in my life. But how long do I have to wait until I put my focus to the dawn that’s coming, the vision? If you get that vision, there’s a great dawn ahead of you in many ways…Vision is always going to be waaay more important than sight.
See tomorrow’s post for other highlights of #TEDxSpringfield
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.
And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”
(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)
The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.
So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.
Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.
While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.
Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”
Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:
“Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
“Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
“Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves
Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”
But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.
And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months, could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.
Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:
We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.
Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,
“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!
Justice Sonia Sotomayor works the crowd (Photo by Shel Horowitz.
By Shel Horowitz
Justice Sonia Sotomayor works the crowd (Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Yes, you can be a United States Supreme Court Justice and still keep your humanity. In an hour and a half of Q&A at the Springfield Public Forum in Springfield, Massachusetts, Justice Sonia Sotomayor not only kept her content humble and hopeful, but did her best to make herself one with the audience.
She answered the first question from the stage, but then left her comfortable armchair, announced that she wanted to make herself more accessible to the people at the far corners of the room, pleaded with the audience not to do anything that would make the Secret Service agents too nervous to let her wander, and then answered all remaining questions while walking around the room shaking hands and getting photographed—and leaving the moderator (another female judge) gaping and wondering where her speaker was at times. I’ve certainly seen speakers mingle, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one who spent virtually the entire speech mingling. It’s especially remarkable in a government official; most of them stay firmly behind their podiums, clinging tightly. I can’t imagine Hillary Clinton doing that. But Sotomayor is like that; she spent her first weeks at the Supreme Court not just boning up on the then-upcoming Citizens United case but also visiting the far corners of the building and greeting the staff. She claims to be the first Supreme Court Justice to visit the telephone operators up on the third floor.
Hillary also probably has help writing her books. Sotomayor–like President Obama–writes her own, even as she acknowledged that writing didn’t come easily to her until a college mentor observed that she was thinking in Spanish (her first language) and translating.
Like Sotomayor, I grew up poor in the Bronx (and actually fantasized about becoming a social justice lawyer and eventually, a Supreme Court Justice—though I love the career I chose instead). And I was thrilled to hear her say things like:
“I wanted to write a book that would give people hope…if I [the child of an immigrant alcoholic, raised in the tough housing projects of New York] can do it, so can you.”
“Squeeze as much as you can out of every day. Give to others. Don’t take a moment to not live life at its fullest.”
“Affirmative Action was a door opener for a door that had been closed to people of my background. Many institutions like to do the same thing over and over. But that success formula excludes certain people. The question is, what did I do with that opportunity? I wanted my career to be a bridge between my community and the wider society.” She noted that others had been given similar opportunity but chose not to make the most of it.
“As a prosecutor, I learned how to seek justice not just for society but for the defendant.
“Every mentor has made a positive mark on my life, and I hope that I have for them.”
“Accept your limitations and your strengths.”
Surprisingly, when asked where in her career she had the most fun, she didn’t hesitate to respond “as a trial judge. Every day, you’re surprised! When I retire from the Supreme Court, I want to go back to it.” She misses the human contact with the plaintiffs and defendants, who are generally not present in appeals or Supreme courtrooms.
When asked why the greatest legal minds in the country have so many split decisions, Sotomayor pointed out that this is part of the Supremes’ mandate. “The case wouldn’t come before the Supreme Court if the answer was clear. We don’t take cases unless there are disagreements in the Circuit Court decisions. That’s why we have 5-4 decisions. It doesn’t mean that the four are wrong, but that the five thought another way. Some people say [the split decisions lessen their faith in government]. I hope the split means you have more faith in the government, because if everything is 9-0, we’re not taking the care we need to. And if there’s a [written] dissent, at least somebody heard you.”
Dissents, for her, are also cause for optimism. “We can write our dissents and hope to influence Congress or a future Supreme Court decision. You have to feel optimistic that things can change. You have to hold that hope, so you can let go” and accept being on the losing side. “I remain optimistic, despite what’s happening in Congress right now.
And she asks each of us to take responsibility, to do our part for a better world, even if it’s as simple as casting a vote or calling a loved one. “Whatever you do, do it with passion and caring. Not voting is the greatest act of being a traitor. What counts is caring enough to make your voice heard. Every day, I try to become a better person, a better Justice. How many of us forget to call a friend who’s sick or suffered a loss? Every day I try to remind myself that the world doesn’t revolve around me. Every night before you go to sleep, ask yourself these two questions:
What have I learned that’s new today?
What good have I done today?
“If you can’t answer those two questions, don’t go to sleep. Send someone a [‘thinking-of-you’] email. Go on Google and learn about something.
Known as a Justice who asks a lot of questions during oral argument, Sotomayor was asked if she often changed her mind based on the lawyers’ responses to the Justices’ questions. And she said that she changes her thinking based on the oral argument, though not necessarily her vote, about 20 percent of the time. To future lawyers in the largely student audience, she advised, “Be happy when we ask questions. We engage you in engaging us.” But she said often, the real benefit to her in oral arguments is from listening to the questions of her colleagues. “I see what road they’re going down, what they’re thinking.” The Justices don’t discuss cases before oral arguments, so these are the first insights she gets about a case’s direction.
In the past, the Court was a very contentious place, with some Justices not speaking to each other for years. That changed, she said, when Sandra Day O’Connor (the first woman Justice, appointed by President Reagan) came onboard. She insisted on building collegial relationships, through instituting several changes including a weekly lunch. “She made a huge difference. There’s an ethos now that if someone says something they shouldn’t have, they call and apologize.”
She chose law, she said, because “I wanted to guide people into making decisions that were fair to themselves and to other people.” It was a way to help people solve problems, and it did not require singing, dancing, or drawing, didn’t require the patience of a teacher, and did not involve medicine; as a diabetic since age 7, she felt she’d spent far too much time in hospitals to want to work in one. When the moderator shot back that Sotomayor was the best salsa dancer she knew, the 61-year-old Justice said she’d taken lessons at 50, when she got tired of being the only Latina she knew who didn’t dance. She asked her mother why she’d never been taught to dance as a child, and her mom replied, “You were always outside chasing fireflies. We could never get you to be still long enough.”
Her final advice was to remember the people who helped you and to overcome your fears. “Every job I’ve had, every obstacle I’ve overcome, I’ve been afraid. None of us gets anywhere in life without the help of others. Nobody accomplishes alone. We are each of us blessed with the good and the bad I hope each of you can appreciate the blessings in your world.”
Note: material in quote marks and not in brackets are as accurate as my notes, memories, and ability to decipher my scrunched handwriting allow (I had no paper so I was writing on the backs of business cards). I apologize for any transcription errors I may have made. Material within square brackets is paraphrased.
I do not use “killing it” or “crushing it” to mean “successful.” Successful does not have to be about dominance and submission, winners and losers. I believe in an abundant, win-win world where we have the power to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—while making a nice profit. The words we choose help determine where we (individually and as a society) are going, and how we get there.
In fact, I set up a whole new website, https://goingbeyondsustainability.com, to bring this message home. Somehow, I don’t think it would have the right tone if I had called this website “killingitforsustainability.com”.
Language matters. A lot. I just told a client yesterday to remove the word “dumb” from her vocabulary; she’s building a brand around smart, sexy, socially conscious blondes, and the “dumb blonde” stereotype is the exact opposite of that.
I don’t use the term, “senior moment.” I see elders as more often wise than confused. I’m 58 and I expect to be doing good work for the rest of my life, whether that turns out to be another 50 years, or whether my time turns out to be much more limited. I avoid gender-specific language; it’s almost always possible to find a gender-inclusive way to say something. “Firefighter” rather than “fireman,” “chair” (or the more cumbersome “chairperson”) instead of “chairman.” Since “s/he” or “co” or any other quick substitute for “he or she” hasn’t become common language, I do say “he or she” or “his and her.” Even though it’s clunky, it is less clunky to my eyes and ears than switching gender every paragraph.
Yes, I know that the word “niggardly” (meaning stingy) has nothing to do entomologically with a certain slur-word directed at black people. The root is different. But because the sounds of the words are so close, I would never use it. I don’t want to reinforce any association with the n-word. I’m also careful about words like “savages” or “primitive” or “cripple.” And I even avoid “sucks,” which was introduced as a slur against gay men. So many words are so loaded up with negative baggage that it’s a whole lot easier just not to use them.
Marketers should pay attention, too. Chevrolet made a huge mistake decades ago when it tried to introduce its popular Nova line into Latin America. Nobody bothered to check what that name meant locally. Oddly enough, it turned out that the locals weren’t exactly breaking down the doors to buy a car whose name is Spanish for “it doesn’t go.”
There is one military metaphor that doesn’t bother me at all, however. I use the word “target” to describe a tightly defined market niche. I like the precision of that. And because I’m a Guerrilla Marketing co-author, I use the phrase “guerrilla marketing.” But if I had been naming the brand, I’d have chosen something less grounded in war (and maybe easier to spell).
Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fish. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fishing. Photo by Shel HorowitzAs a vegetarian for the past 42 years, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about fish. But I went to a talk, “Food Grabs vs. Climate Justice: How capitalists and climate deniers are locking up access to land and sea, and how Food Sovereignty movements are creating real climate solutions,” part of the Center for Popular Economics’ annual summer institute in Western Massachusetts.
Moderated by Sara Mersha (Grassroots International), panelists included Michele Mesmain (Slow Food International), Betsy Garrold (Food for Maine’s Future), and Seth Macinko (Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island). Both Macinko and Mesmain focused on fish and fisheries.
Both experts agreed on the need to control overfishing–and both said there’s a better way than the current widely embraced privitization “solution”: taking the public resource of the sea held in common, and giving it, for free and in perpetuity, to large corporations who are already catching the most fish. These corporations then can lease fishing rights back to the local fisherfolks, who used to be able to fish them for free–or simply force them out of business.
Macinko said you can manage a resource to prevent overfishing without savaging the historic commons rights, and noted the unholy alliance of environmental groups (including Environmental Defense Fund), academics, corporate-oriented major foundations such as Pew, government and trans-government authorities including the World Bank, the Big Fishing lobby, and, lo and behold, the Koch Brothers’ foundation pushing for this rights grab. Then Mesmain showed three models of successful fisheries management without privitization: a 1000-year-old guild governing France’s Mediterranean coast, a much more recent initiative in the Basque region of Spain–both involving open-sea fisheries, and one through the Okanagan Nations Alliance (8 nations/tribes in Washington State and British Columbia) covering inland river salmon fisheries.
The last hundred years have also seen a similar ratchet (amplified, I’d argue, by the technology of media and of the economy) in civil rights. It’s unlikely (with the exception of despotic edicts) that women will ever lose the vote, that discrimination on race will return to apartheid-like levels, that marriage will return to being an exclusionary practice… once a social justice is embraced by a culture, it’s rarely abandoned.
Unfortunately, those “despotic edicts” are all-too-common. While the general trend is not to reverse progress, there are far too many exceptions:
Women’s rights in Iran under the Shah or Kabul pre-Taliban versus today
Rights of Jews, Gypsies, and LGB folks in prewar Germany vs. the Nazi years
The collapse of Sarajevo’s much-vaunted multiculturalism into massive racism and “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990s
Although this is a pessimistic post, I am ultimately an optimist. I think Godin is basically right–but there are many, many exceptions. Let’s work together for a world in which those exceptions are no longer tolerated–we can do this!
As someone whose stepfather is Japanese, and who had to pose with my wife, my sister and her husband in the authentic yukatas (they’re like kimonos, but less formal and lighter weight) and obis (ceremonial belts) he gave us for some event–and as someone who has certainly seen my own Jewish heritage symbols appropriated and/or misused by mainstream culture–I can relate on some level her perspective.
But I also feel it’s crucial that we learn about the wider world around us, and that e.g. eating Thai food doesn’t mean you understand Thai culture. I think the experience of wearing the very elegant but very restrictive formal Japanese outfit with kimono and obi can provide a little window into what it was like to be upper-class female in 19th-century Japan. It saddens me that those teachable moments were lost in this.
I also do have concerns about how many other opportunities to touch another culture have been taken from us in the name of political correctness. A few years ago, a local high school even canceled a production of West Side Story because they were accused of racism–missing the entire point. Ditto the campaigns to purge high school classrooms of Mark Twain’s anti-racism classic Huckleberry Finn because it used the n-word, even though Twain’s purpose was to use that epithet (which, in his time, was probably the most common word to describe blacks) to build a bridge between the black and white cultures of 19th-century southern Illinois, right next to slave-owning Missouri.
To me, the correct response would have been for the museum to meet with the protestors and ask for their input in recasting the exhibit so it enlarged the educational aspect in a way that the Japanese-American protestors found appropriate–and for the protestors to have made that, rather than ceasing the exhibit, as their demand. Instead, it’s all this shouting at each other instead of talking to each other. Yes, you protest, but then you collaborate and build a greater whole.
Of course, an even more appropriate way to handle it would have been to involve local Japanese-American organizations in the planning and curation to begin with.
Seven reasons why this letter failed to raise money from me
What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty.
The letter is in Spanish. Although I do happen to speak Spanish, I’m not great at reading big quantities of it. And I’m pretty sure that whatever charity rented them the list, it’s one that does business in English. Which means most of the people receiving it won’t be able to read it at all.
They’ve enclosed six cents of real American money. Which probably upped the cost of the mailing by at least a dollar apiece, because of the technologies involved in mounting coins precisely on circles, facing the right direction, etc. If they can afford to spend a dollar to send me money, they don’t need me to send them money.
If I understand the Spanish correctly, they actually request that I send them back the six cents along with my donation. If this is supposed to weigh on my psychology and pull on my heartstrings, it fails. It just gets me annoyed that their gift is false.
It’s not a group I’ve heard of, and they don’t do enough to build my confidence in the organization. Other than telling me (on the back) that 95 percent of contributions go to programs, and logos (again on the back) from Ministry Watch and BBB, they do basically nothing to convince me that this is a legitimate organization. There’s no reference to checking them out on Charity Navigator, nothing about what they’ve actually done with the money they received. All they tell me (translating) is “Founded in 1982, Food For The Poor is an interdenominational Christian organization that works for ending the suffering of the poor in the Caribbean and Latin America.” It doesn’t say how they accomplish this.
I’m not a Christian and prefer to contribute to good works through nondenominational or Jewish organizations. So I’m not in their target market.
I respond much better to pictures of people being empowered through changemaking organizations than I do to 1970s-Biafra-style hunger photos. And I think a lot of other people do as well; in my own copywriting, I emphasize the positive change, not the desperation.
It’s addressed to Señor Sheldon Horowitz. True, Sheldon Horowitz (generally without Señor attached) was my name until I was 15. But as a junior in high school, I shortened it to Shel, and started coming out from under a lot of negative emotional baggage tied up with my birth name. In 1983 when I got married, Shel became my legal name. I didn’t move to my current home until 1998. Thus, there has never been a Señor Sheldon Horowitz at this address. Call people what they want to be called, not by a name they rejected. Yeah, I know, they were just buying a list—but it must have been a nonresponsive list, because calling me Sheldon predisposes me to reject the request.
The sad thing is, it would have been easy for them to do so much better. I actually went to Charity Navigator and looked them up anyway. They score very well on both financial and organizational criteria. They took in over a billion dollars in 2013, and funded programs with almost $985 million that year.
Too, the Charity Navigator site gives me a description, obviously written by the charity itself, that would have done a lot to assuage my concerns, had it been in the letter:
Food For The Poor (FFP) ministers to spiritually renew impoverished people throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Established in 1982, FFP’s goals are to improve the health, economic, social and spiritual conditions of the men, women and children we serve. Food For The Poor raises funds and provides direct relief assistance to the poor, usually by purchasing specifically requested materials and distributing them through the churches and charity organizations already operating in areas of need. Since its founding FFP has distributed more than 63,000 tractor-trailer loads of aid to the poor. We have also built more than 84,000 housing units for people desperately in need of adequate shelter, and completed more than 1,475 water projects that provide lifesaving water and sanitation to hundreds of thousands of people in need.
Nice and specific about what they do and how they do it–so why not include it in their mailings?
Freedom to exercise one’s own religion is NOT the same as freedom to stuff that religion down others’ throats. This is what the right-wing Christians have not understood about the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage. No one is forcing them to marry each other–and they do not have the right to keep others from marrying the ones they love, just because their religion doesn’t agree.
When my family was kosher, I went to private Jewish schools (yeshivas). It may have been that part of my parents’ reasons was to keep me away from the “corrupting” influence of non-kosher food.
This post is inspired by a report of a Canadian mayor telling Muslim parents the schools would not stop serving pork–a report that was a hoax (which took about seven seconds to determine). But just because the report was false (and probably motivated by someone seeking to stir up religious divisions) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about the underlying issue: when does one person’s freedom stop and another’s start?
I am a vegetarian and I would never say to a school system, “don’t serve meat because it is offensive to me.” On the contrary, it is offensive to me when someone tells me I can’t eat the food I want because that food offends them, and I wouldn’t presume to make those choices for others. Sure, I wish more people would turn vegetarian, and I can list a dozen reasons why vegetarianism is good for the planet and good for our bodies.
I will say (and have said), “please don’t bring meat into a potluck at my vegetarian house.” A parent offended that foods he/she doesn’t eat are served in the cafeteria has other choices. There are schools where no pork is served–in fact, I know for certain that pork is not served at any Orthodox yeshiva or Islamic or Seventh Day Adventist school. It would be offensive if the Muslim kids and Orthodox Jewish kids and vegetarian kids attending public school were *forced* to eat pork. But it should not be offensive to sit in a cafeteria where others are eating it.
A friend shared a meme on Facebook this morning: photo of an Assembly of God church marquee with this message on its movable sign: “A free thinker is Satan’s slave.”
But apparently even this is too high a barrier. All they can find are Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family—and they are not exactly models of terrific human behavior. They are taken to safety and the cities are destroyed.
Though I’m not particularly religious, I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household. People obeyed the commandments as they understood them, but spent lots of time debating their merits—and, for that matter, dissecting the world’s news. And of course, much of the commentary on the Torah came from the sages of old, who would spend hours discussing the intricacies and shades of meaning of some obscure passage. In today’s world, the Jewish Renewal movement (which I do consider myself a part of) has again, actively engaged, reinvented traditions, and provided lots of commentary.
And this is certainly not an exclusively Jewish trait. From the Catholic Worker, Vatican II, and Liberation Theology movements to the preachings of Pope Francis, we see active engagement permeating Catholicism. And we find similar movements in the Islamic, Protestant, and Buddhist worlds (think about the Dalai Lama, for example). And, I’m guessing, in every other significant religion.
The miracle of religion, in my mind, is that people do question, grapple, argue, test out theories—and continue to come back to their own personal version of God.
I feel sorry for the person who crafted the message on the sign.
