Bernie Sanders said two things worth noting the other day, at the same event. When asked at a Town Hall meeting how to convince Bernie supporters to vote for Hillary if she’s the nominee, he responded, “it is “incumbent on her” to win over his supporters. Specifically, he pointed out that he doesn’t exercise control over his supporters and nor should he, and that many have a deep suspicion of a candidate with such close ties to Wall Street. He even gave her a road map: endorse his Medicare-for-ALL healthcare plan.
At the same event, he announced that he would do “everything in my power to keep the Republicans out of the White House.”
She still does not get that Bernie is not a politician in charge of a machine in the old style of politics. He finds himself at the forefront of a people’s movement that he does not control. Bernie can endorse and I’m sure will endorse Hillary if she is a nominee, but that doesn’t mean he is able to overcome his supporters’ massive and justified skepticism of her belief systems and her actions. Once again, he has spoken the truth; she does have to win them over.
And Hillary needs these people. Independents and left-leaning Democrats will be major factors in November. If they stay home, we get whichever monster emerges from the Republican convention. If they show up, we get a Democrat.
I have serious issues with Hillary Clinton, and particularly her foreign policy. I worry that she’s too much of a war-hawk and way too comfortable with the worst excesses of Israel’s ultra-right government. I don’t love her cluelessness about people’s movements and her coziness with Wall Street. And while she’s obviously extremely smart, she’s done some really dumb things over and over again. I don’t expect any significant progressive shift under a Hillary Clinton administration.
In the past, including in 2000, I’ve voted 3rd party. Of course, I have the luxury of living in a state where my vote doesn’t count anyway. Knowing that Massachusetts was safely Democratic made it easy to vote my conscience and cast my vote for Nader.
Yet, if she’s the nominee, I will hold my nose and vote for her. The prospect of either a Trump or Cruz presidency is so distasteful that I want the margins of victory to be enormous; this year, I want to be counted in that victory margin, and not pushed off to the side with a Green Party vote that nobody pays any attention to. Under Clinton, I would expect some attention to economic policies that help poor people—as a sop to Sanders supporters, if nothing else—and some good stuff on women’s issues. I would expect excellent Supreme Court nominees.
And, unfortunately, I would expect once again to be out in the streets with thousands of others, doing my best to keep us from being sucked into whatever war HRC would get us into.
All my life, I’ve heard about the authoritarian Chinese government micromanaging every aspect of everyone’s lives, the government’s total control over career options, and of course, the “reeducation” of intellectuals and destruction of cultural resources during the Cultural Revolution.Getting a visa was a major and expensive hassle that had to be set up weeks ahead, and there was no way to get a business visa without an invitation from someone.
The other obvious difference was the way China blocks many key Internet sites, including all Google sites, Facebook, and Twitter. LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Bing do work, however.
And yet, during our brief visit, the society felt very open. While there are plenty of cops and security guards (including community volunteers who have almost identical uniforms to the police but with the addition of bright red armbands), most whom we saw were not obviously armed and seemed for the most part to be a force for peace, not repression. We’d often see cops joking around with passers-by or chatting amicably with each other. And mobility was almost totally unrestricted, other than at paid attractions. As visitors, we felt no police presence singling us out, had no “minders,” and we were unrestricted even when we went to meet a young couple that a friend of ours had met through Couchsurfing.
Even when our entire group of 26 struck up a conversation with a red-robed Tibetan monk (in the government’s eyes, a potential dissident) who happened to walk through Tiananmen Square with a stylish female companion, there was no feeling of being watched. Since I briefly had a Tibetan housemate and know how to say hello in Tibetan, I even greeted him in his own language. His face lit up—but he got frustrated and disappointed when he tried to answer back and realized that was the only Tibetan I knew. (China claims Tibet and has often consideredorganized Tibetan Buddhism a hostile force; the Tibetans see themselves as an occupied nation, and govern the religious aspects from exile in India.) He spoke fluent Chinese, so our tour director interpreted for us. He posed for selfies with all those in our group who wanted one and was with us for about ten minutes. Plenty of cops were on the plaza, and none took the least interest in this interchange.
I’ve seen photos of China in the 60s and 70s with Chairman Mao’s picture everywhere, providing a Big Brother is Watching motif. We saw exactly two pictures of Mao, other than on the 1 yuan bill: a giant portrait on Tiananmen Gate into Forbidden City,
A guard stands near the Gate of Heavenly Peace and its giant picture of Mao. Photo by D. Dina Friedman.
and a modest poster in a random store window. We did not knowingly see a single picture of current Chairman Xi. Our tour director told us that the Cultural Revolution is definitely considered a mistake, and that the current government rates Mao “70 percent good and 30 percent bad.” He confirmed my suspicion that the prosecution of the “Gang of Four” (Mao’s widow and three comrades) a few years after Mao’s death was as much about repudiating Mao as anything else.
I noted only these very minor incidents:
An officer on Tiananmen spun rapidly in an about-face when a tourist tried to take his picture; the cop Dina managed to catch in the picture shown here suspected he’d been photographed and glared at her, but made no attempt to engage.
An annoying beggar outside the Shanghai Museum was told firmly to go elsewhere and leave our group alone.
I was told to put my camera away after taking a photo of an ad inside a subway station—but I was not asked to delete the photo.
Street crime seemed to be nonexistent. The only threats I felt to my safety had to do with driving patterns, and particularly the very challenging lane-by-lane crawl across a completely uncontrolled eight-lane rotary to get between our hotel in Xian and the subway entrance one block away. Wasn’t too thrilled about silent electric mopeds sneaking up on both sides of what I’d thought was a one-way bike lane either.
Quite frankly, St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2002 (long afterthe collapse of the Soviet Union) as well as New York and Washington post-9/11 have felt far more invasive. It is, however, the first country I’ve ever visited that routinely x-rays all bags belonging to subway passengers before allowing them to board.
Our tour director, who had been at the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, even told us that when someone steps out of line on social media, all that happens is eventually the dissident’s account is closed. However, in the aftermath of 1989, friends of his were jailed.
Still, every resident of China we discussed it (a limited number) with felt oppressed by the government. One family we met with is actually arranging to relocate to Canada. So obviously, there’s more repression than meets the eye.
Shel Horowitz’s latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, shows how to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance—using the power of the profit motive.
2016 is going to be a GREAT year for the green world, and the green business world in particular. I thought so even before two developments this past week that make me even more optimistic:
Add in the widely spreading understanding in the business world that going green the right way slashes costs, boosts revenues, and generates profit, and it’s not surprising that 2016 will be a year of great progress. (If you don’t yet see the connection, order a copy of my new book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. It’s got hundreds of examples ranging from Fortune 100 to solopreneurs.)
Expect to see lots more high-level research, looking for holistic steps that create big jumps in energy efficiency and big reductions in waste. Already, we’ve made amazing technological leaps within just the past couple of years. I’ll name two among hundreds:
Approaches like biomimicry—modeling how nature solves complex problems—will let sustainability ripple through the whole culture, relatively rapidly.
Electrical storage (a major restraint on renewable energy growth) has made huge strides, including the vaunted Tesla battery systems.
All is not sunshine and roses, of course. The Act of Congress that extended the clean-energy tax credits also opened up the door for some of the worst kind of carbon-intensive development: exporting the dirtiest types of fossil fuel energy. Public pressure—activism in the streets, in the boardrooms, and in the halls of legislative power—must hound every proposal to put in fracking, use or transport tar-sands oil, build unnecessary pipelines, etc.
One key meme has to be “honor the commitments we made at COP21.”
If the business community, especially, makes it clear that it expects the US to do its part in meeting the targets, and that exporting fossil fuels across oceans will work against this, that open door may stay largely unused. But it will take vigilance.
One not-so obvious trend
The above predictions are relatively mainstream in the green world, even if they appear startling to those outside of it. Let me conclude with a much more “out-there” proposition:
Businesses will go beyond merely going green. Sustainability will be seen as a first step. More and more companies will be going beyond sustainability to create a world where hunger and poverty turn into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
Why? Because they will see enormous profit opportunities, and because it feels so much better to oneself, employees, neighbors, suppliers and other stakeholders to see making the world better as a key success metric. How? I wrote a whole book to answer that question.
Visiting Minneapolis for the holidays, we happened to walk by the American Indian Movement Interpretive Center and its Thunder Before the Storm Gallery, located in the Ancient Traders Market, 1113 E. Franklin Avenue (at South 15th Avenue).
As a child in the 1960s and 1970s, I learned about the powerful activism of the American Indian Movement; they were in the newspapers constantly with bold actions around native people’s rights in the US and elsewhere.
Their multipronged approach included:
Nonviolent direct action such as the occupation of
Alcatraz Island and the Trail of Broken Treaties March on Washington/occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs offices
Shows of force, including the 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota
Creating alternative institutions such as schools, community media (including a radio station), and career training programs
Later, in 1980, I attended the Black Hills Gathering, as did many people involved with AIM, several of whom spoke from the stage. The Black Hills Gathering fused the causes of environmentalism/protecting land and water/the safe energy movement with those of indigenous rights around the world, and particularly the native peoples of North America.
Along with the Seabrook, NH nuclear power plant site occupation of 1977, the Black Hills Gathering was a turning point in my own activist journey. I’d already been involved in the safe energy movement for several years, starting well before Seabrook, and before that was a high school and college activist on ending the Vietnam War, abolishing nuclear weapons, LBG rights, and students’ rights.
The Black Hills Gathering was my first deep exposure to the specifics of the indigenous people’s movements. Speaker after speaker drew connections among seemingly disparate struggles like the Dine (Navajo) people’s resistance to uranium mining in the Southwest, the struggle to replace a collaborationist tribal government on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation, and the battles of native peoples around the country and around the world to block the corporatization and expropriation of land, water, and other resources.
I trace my advocacy on water issues, and my promotion of the idea that urban rooftops could be food and energy sources, to this 3-day outdoor conference and festival. Those are both areas that I still talk about 35 years later; they’re even discussed in my newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
Walking into the AIM Interpretive Center, seeing the photos on the walls, brought back all those memories.
The gallery doesn’t get a lot of visitors, but it is open to the pubic (and it’s part of a neighborhood that’s a hotspot of American Indian culture). We were lucky enough in our visit to meet Eric Byrd, AIM’s archivist and curator, who filled us in on plans for future exhibits and on the photo-history publishing program the organization is working on.
If you’re in the Twin Cities, pop on in. If you’re not, visit the website.
Once again, yesterday, I came across the tired old canard that the only way to fight bad things and bad people is to put weapons in the hands of good people. We hear it after every mass shooting.
And not only is it not true, it’s a very destructive thought pattern. Too often, when good people get guns, they turn into not-so-good people. Lord Acton’s famous dictum, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely” seems to hold very true. Dictators were often first hailed as liberators; as one of hundreds of examples, think about Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.
Gandhian techniques were actually very effective against the Nazis. The scholar Gene Sharp documented this extensively in The Politics of Nonviolent Action trilogy. And frankly, the Brits in India were no saints. They were brutal and violent, though lacking the organized killing machine (gas chambers, etc.) the Nazis built. You may be familiar with the King of Denmark very publicly wearing the yellow star. That’s just one example of hundreds. Many of these incidents had better outcomes than a lot of gun-based responses. And even when they didn’t, the reprisals were directed against those who acted, and not—as so often happened when partisans killed Nazis—the entire community.
The segregated American South was also quite brutal and violent, as shown very effectively in the recent movie, “Selma.” Martin Luther King considered Gandhi a mentor. Gandhi in turn learned from (and actually corresponded with) Tolstoy. Mandela, I’m sure, studied both Gandhi and King, and in turn influenced the Arab Spring.
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!
One of the points I make when I give my “‘Impossible” is a Dare (NOT a Fact)” talks is that every one of us has the power to be an agent of change. For every Count Leo Tolstoy (born into wealth and privilege and used his position to work for social change), there are dozens if not hundreds of Martin Luther Kings, Gandhis, and Mother Teresas: ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Most meaningful social change gets accomplished by ordinary people, especially when they organize and work together. I personally started the movement that saved our local mountain. Bree’s courage and power are the norm, not the exception.
I’ve often heard very successful people get asked, “How did you do _____ before you were _______ (the successful person’s name, emphasized)? Even with my own rather limited fame, I’ve been asked “How did you save the mountain before you were Shel Horowitz?”
Here’s what they’re missing. What turned me from Shel Horowitz, self-employed marketing consultant working out of a farmhouse, to Shel Horowitz, locally famous saver of mountains, was going out and starting the movement to save the mountain. It was the doing that created the fame.
Yes, I did have the marketing skills to leverage that and eventually build a brand around profitability consulting for green and socially conscious businesses. Yes, I had the writing and research skills to create a body of work that attracted a major publisher and a celebrity co-author for my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. Yes, I created enough leverage from that book to be able to do my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, comes out in March, with endorsements by Jack Canfield, Seth Godin, the founders of BNI and GreenBiz.com, the author of The New Rules of Green Marketing (among others), and essays from the authors of Unstoppable/Unstoppable Women and Diet for a Small Planet. I grabbed the opportunities to make more of a difference in the wider world, and not just my own community. But just because I made those opportunities happen doesn’t mean they weren’t available to others.
Social change can be based in very small actions. The backstory about Mistinguette Smith’s article is that her editor wanted to ditch the phrase in the title, “Stay Woke.” Mistinguette brought that discussion to Facebook, and that may have been why she eventually won the argument. But the key element to making the change is mindset. This is how I heard about her article before it was published, and how I knew it was published and could read it.
To accomplish positive social change, I think we need two things: one is the sense that we can make a difference and the willingness to try—something any of us can achieve.
The other is the motivation to achieve a higher good than simply obtaining power or profit.I’d even go so far as to say the need to make the world better is a basic human drive, just like food or shelter or sex. If we’re not doing this in some small way, we don’t feel complete.
Let’s look at the difference between two ordinary men who led their countries out of apartheid: Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (formerly called Rhodesia). Both were hailed as liberators originally. Mugabe, a teacher and prison-educated lawyer, turned out to be a brutal thug, a dictator motivated by the desire for power and wealth.
But Mandela was clearly motivated by a desire to heal his suffering country. His actions were all about unity and reconciliation. He will be remembered as a hero to the end of time.
I’m up to the part of Naomi Klein?‘s This Changes Everything where she talks about the interconnectedness of geolocalized people’s movements opposing “extreme/reckless resource extraction” (e.g., tar-sands oil, fracked gas and oil, mountaintop removal for coal). She dubs the movement “Blockadia.” She also casts very appropriate darts, just before this section, at the crazy idea that we should avoid climate catastrophe by throwing so much pollution into the sky that the sun can’t get through. Talk about a cure worse than the disease! Hard to believe some scientists are actually serious about this.
She points out that these technologies are far more intrusive and polluting and resource-intensive than the old-style mines and wells—and that the opposition often parses out as saving our water from destruction, modeling around the Precautionary Principle of not unleashing technologies we can’t control, and using the positive framing of protecting our water (very similar to the way I framed Save the Mountain 15 years ago—the successful movement to keep a nasty housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts, US). I have said for many years that we have plenty of substitutes for oil, but if the water is gone (or unusable), so are we.
Like everything I’ve ever read by Klein, the book is impeccably researched—including interviewing primary sources directly and even suffering through climate-denier conferences and similar events in person; pursuit of the truth can be painful, sometimes.
And she isn’t afraid to go after the movement’s sacred cows. She scolds some very prominent environmental groups including The Nature Conservancy for betraying their core mission in the service of their large extraction-industry funders—even putting an oil well into one of its nature preserves, where the bird it was set up to protect can no longer be found. And she finds Sir Richard Branson’s proclamations of concern for the planet to be at odds with his actions. (I’m hoping she’s wrong about him. Even if she turns out to be right—and she might well be—he has certainly used his considerable charisma to educate the public on climate change.)
Environmentalists need to take these accusations very seriously. We need to know who we fund, and what they do with the money. And we definitely need to build the movement that insists upon meaningful action to stave off catastrophic climate change—which would have been much easier 20 or 30 years ago, but, I believe, is still possible now.
However, I break with Klein over solutions. She has essentially no faith in the business community or in technology, and she seems to think that any time an environmental group partners with a polluter, that group is sullied. Maybe I’m less of a purist than she is. But I’ve just finished another wonderful book, The Necessary Revolution, by Peter Senge et al. Reading the two together was very interesting, because Senge’s book is full of great examples of NGOs and corporations working together to tackle problems in a very meaningful way, while Klein’s is the counterpoint of these partnerships leading to a failure to address the deeper issues.
Technology doesn’t have to be about extreme extraction, GMOs designed to absorb more pesticides, nuclear power, or blocking the sun. Science and engineering can actually be the climate movement’s friends. Unlike the crazy unproven schemes requiring billions or trillions of dollars and dozens of years to ramp up, these innovations often combine deep conservation, greater efficiency in harnessing clean renewable energy, and even the fascinating science of biomimcry to slash energy use, carbon footprint, and waste—right now.
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.
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.
