Along with much of the nation, I get to decide what vision for the next four years inspires me. As a progressive, I have many friends in both the Warren and Sanders camps. 

I  think either Bernie or Elizabeth would do well in debates against DT and win big against him, IF the likely Dem voters in swing states are allowed to vote and if ballots are counted fairly. Those are two very big IFs, and they will be an issue with pretty much any Democratic candidate. For Sanders, it’s even more of an issue because the party is so hostile to the idea of his nomination that they will do whatever they can to sabotage it. One only has to look at the dirty tricks the Hillary Clinton campaign used against him four years ago.

But my big worry with Bernie is he may get elected but be functionally unable to govern, because the Dem establishment will block his agenda at every turn, as the Repubs promised but failed to do with DT. Bernie is not a team player or a negotiator and he will get sabotaged.

I also think Elizabeth is smarter and her plans are more well-thought-out. She would prove that HRC didn’t lose because she’s a woman but because she 1) came with a whole lot of negative baggage, such as the pay-to-play scandal, 2) ran a terrible campaign (as just one example: failing to visit Wisconsin even once between the convention and the election, despite losing hugely to Sanders in the Wisconsin primary), and 3) faced a disinformation campaign funded by at least one foreign government. I voted proudly for Bernie in the primary four years ago (and not-so-proudly for HRC in November), but I’m voting for Warren tomorrow. I live in Massachusetts and feel she’s done an excellent job as my Senator.

I do agree with my Bernie-supporter friends that if she does poorly on Super Tuesday, it’s time for her to endorse Bernie and get out.

I have to wonder yet again why the Dems didn’t bring us mandatory hand-countable paper ballots (I wrote that post back in 2007)  and ranked-choice voting when they had the chance in ’09. I don’t think DT would be squatting in the Oval Office if there had not been active voter suppression (see that top link in this post again) and if there were paper-ballot recounts in those three very marginal states that put him over the top–and yet the Dems ignored (and may have actually sabotaged) Jill Stein’s effort to get recounts there. Their failure means I and millions of others do not accept the 2016 results as legitimate. It would have been healthy for the country to settle the question of who actually one.

I also don’t believe DT would be president if we’d had ranked choice four years ago. We might have President Hillary Clinton, President Ted Cruz, or President Bernie Sanders–but we would not have this lying, cheating, mean-spirited sociopathic bully destroying our foreign policy, our environment, our education, and our human rights.

I am proudly voting for Warren tomorrow. And in response to those who say a vote for anyone other than Sanders is ultimately a vote for Biden, let me quote democracy activist and constitutional scholar Jennifer Taub:

Q: Bernie supporters told me that a vote for Elizabeth is a vote for Biden. Is that true?

A: No. A vote for Elizabeth is a vote for Elizabeth. Bernie’s camp is reasonably worried that nobody will have a majority of delegates when they get to the convention this summer?.

There are rules in place that Bernie helped write in 2016. Under those rules, on the first vote at the convention, pledged delegates must vote according to our primaries. If nobody has a majority, then there will be a second vote. On the second vote, delegates can realign. And so on.

It’s quite likely that neither Bernie nor Biden nor Warren will have a majority at the outset. So, all three of them will be viable and there will be some serious horse trading.

Please join me in voting for the future we want, and not any kind of “lesser evil.” We might have to do that in November, but we certainly don’t have to do it now.

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Healing

Sand Mandala by Anandajoti Bhikkhu from Sadao, ThailandThis year, healing will have both a personal and a global component, starting with a deeply moving experience in mid-December. In August, 2018, my stepfather was in the crosswalk in front of his apartment, on his way to his daily 3-mile jog. He had activated the flashing light and was making his way across when a driver, looking at the GPS on the phone in her lap instead of the road, struck and killed him.

On December 16, 2019, we finally got our day in court. In collaboration with my sister and my wife, we had submitted a statement more than a year earlier saying we didn’t feel incarceration would serve any purpose, and we proposed instead that the driver perform community service by speaking about distracted driving to audiences that would include high school students. This came out of our belief in restorative justice, and not out of any human connection with the defendant.

But that connection came when we went to court. I read my statement and added some unscripted thoughts based on information that had come to light since I’d submitted it. She read a deep and sincere apology. We both cried during our statements.

After she was sentenced to three years of probation with 200 hours per year of community service, half of it speaking, I went up and hugged her, and then we all (the defendant, my wife and I, and our respective lawyers) found a meeting room and spent about 40 minutes together, forging a connection that I think will be lasting. Before the hearing, I never in my wildest dreams thought we might become friends. Now I think that’s quite possible.

I wrote up that day in some detail in the Gratitude Journal I’ve posted daily on Facebook since March, 2018. And I heard from several people that my account was one of the most moving things they’d read in a long time. The Gratitude Journal, by the way, has deepened my life in many ways, but that’s for another time.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this hearing was a day after Shonali Burke sent out her newsletter with her three Brogan words, and that she and I have been emailing about her newsletter, and my promise to her that if I came up with the words, I’d share them with her.

So that’s on the personal side. Let’s touch on the global side of healing.

For me, healing is bound up with justice. All of the work I do to make the world better has both a healing component and a focus on justice. Whether I’m attempting to help heal an ill individual (I do send prayers when asked), a threatened ecosystem, or a rift between very different communities with different culture and values, these two parts will be there.

And especially when there’s so much division and even hatred in our society today, it’s very challenging to find the positive, find the places of agreement, and work outward from there to mutual respect even though our conclusions–coming out of those widely divergent values and cultures–may be so different.

This has been a challenge my entire adult life, starting when I was 17 or 18 and at a demonstration at a military base near my college in Ohio. I found myself drawn to the fences, where a few of us were starting to talk with the soldiers on the other side of those chain-links. And I found that this felt really powerful.

I’m far from an expert in cross-barrier dialogue, but I find that the more I do it, the easier it gets. Even with my limited skills, I work really hard to find ways for people who disagree to talk and listen with each other. And the opportunities are all around us. Over these fifty years, I’ve had conversations not just as a progressive talking with conservatives but also as a Jew talking with Arabs and Muslims, a bisexual interacting with and educating both straights and gays (separately), a believer in conscious capitalism working with socialists who have absolutely no use for the business world, a believer in minimum standards of living for poor people who gets into ardent discussions with uber-capitalists who think anyone can claw their way out of poverty, a techno-klutz among geeks and a whiz kid among Luddites. Some of these have been highly structured, others are casual conversations.

As I said, opportunities for dialogue are all around us.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my three words and the rationale and goals underpinning them. You’re welcome to share this with friends and colleagues–and to post your own three words in the comments.

If you missed the earlier posts, please click to read Part 1, Clarity, and Part 2, Justice,

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Guest post by Seth Godin, 

Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.
Seth Godin. Photo by Jill Greenberg. Courtesy of Seth Godin.

reprinted with his permission. Originally published on his blog under the title, “‘Not good enough’ is an easy place to hide

 

Sniffing at the others who care is a form of virtue signalling. It’s also an ineffective way to create real change.

“My Prius Hybrid gets 140 miles per gallon.”

“My Tesla is solar powered.”

“Really, well I take an electric scooter.”

“We carpool by sharing a horse.”

“A horse? You should walk!”

This misses the real problem: The 1998 Chevy Suburban, with just one person on board, doing a forty-mile commute at 12 miles per gallon.

The same goes for ranking elected officials on who is the most perfect on the issue we care about.

The people who are paying attention are the ones who are trying. And shaming people who are trying because they’re not perfect is a terrific way to discourage them from trying. On the other hand, the core of every system is filled with the status quo, a status quo that isn’t even paying attention.

Focusing the group’s energy on shutting down stripped-mine coal is going to make far more impact than scolding the few who are trying.

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50 years ago today, October 15, 1969, my life changed forever. That was the day I became an activist, for real.

Yes, there was a time when as a toddler, I destroyed the cigarettes my parents’ party guests left lying around on the coffee table to protect the air quality of our apartment. Yes, there was the one-kid boycott I started that summer of 1969 of a movie theater that charged me for an adult ticket and made me sit in the children’s section (and I have still never been back to that theater). Yes, I grew up in a social change household and my mom dragged me around with her as she campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Yes, I had already decided to become a vegetarian, although my mom had extracted a promise to wait until I stopped growing. So I was predisposed. But I wasn’t an activist yet.

But that day, I participated in the national Vietnam Moratorium Day—which is why I still remember the date—and went to my first peace rally. Alone, I walked the few blocks from our apartment building on Loring Place at Tremont Avenue to NYU’s Bronx campus (now Bronx Community College), where I listened to the speakers.

Marching at the Women's March on Washington with my wife and children
Marching at the Women’s March on Washington with my wife and children (from left: son-in-law Bobby, daughter Alana, wife Dina, me, son Rafael)

I was 12 years old, and had just started 9th grade.

One of the speakers, who was probably only about 6 years older than me, proclaimed, “The Vietnam war is an undeclared war.”

I hadn’t known that.

And with this statement, my whole world came crashing down. All my faith in the checks and balances of the American system of government that I’d learned from social studies teachers turned out to be a lie. I started questioning everything I knew.

I still show up at many demonstrations. In the photo above, I’m holding a sign that says “Patriots Protect People and Planet” that I made for that protest: the Women’s March counterinaugural on January 21, 2017. A few days later, I turned it over and wrote “Another Jew for Human Rights,” and brought it to protest the administration’s first attempt at a Muslim ban. Both sides of that sign have gotten quite a workout the past 2-3/4 years.

But I learned early that showing up at demonstrations isn’t enough.

When my carefully constructed world fell apart on that October day in 1969, I started looking for ways to make a difference. To find that path back to the democracy I’d been promised, to make sure the system worked so the next time the US went to war, it would have at least been vetted by Congress (little did I know how THAT would play out! Most American wars since then have also been undeclared.) And to work for peace.

So peace and democracy were my first causes. A few months later, the first Earth Day added the environment to my focus. Over the years, I took up many others: human rights/opposing discrimination, safe energy, affordable housing, food and transportation justice, social change journalism, dialogue across differences, and many subsets and intersections of these.

Before long, I was joining organizations, writing and publishing about social change actions (starting with articles in an alternative paper at my high school when I was 15), planning events from speakers to rallies to the safe energy “swim-in” where I gave my first TV interview dripping wet in my bathing suit, building coalitions,  doing the hard work of helping to build movements–and making tons of friends, by the way. In fact, I’m going to a meeting of our Western Massachusetts Jews for Immigration Justice meeting this afternoon, where we’ll debrief a successful mass rally we held last week and plan our next steps.

Many of these were just as accidental or based on a random insight as my original peace activism.

Although I joined my first two environmental action groups (one in my neighborhood and one in my high school) I only got into the safe energy movement in a real way after researching “the pros and cons of nuclear power” for a college paper in 1974—and that in turn led directly to my getting involved with Clamshell Alliance and getting arrested at Seabrook three years later (another life-changing moment). This is the sign I carried to that action.

Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Sign by Nancy Hodge Green, used at Seabrook, 1977. Photo by Shel Horowitz.

My paths to human rights and opposing discrimination came in part from being told I was too young to count when I was an early activist, in part from my own coming out as bisexual as a 16-year-old college freshman, in part from being hired at age 22 for my one and only paid organizing job—charged with building a near-defunct Gray Panther chapter in Brooklyn (as a VISTA Volunteer with pay the first year of $82 a week in NYC!), in part from a growing awareness of disability issues as a 6-year member of Northampton’s official city Disability Committee, and in part from seeing the urban poverty all around me in the various cities I lived in as a child or during college internships—such as the ghetto neighborhood in Washington, DC I walked through on my way to work, or the one I biked through to visit my then-girlfriend (now wife of 36 years) in Brooklyn.

But it also comes from inserting myself into situations where some people might think I don’t belong—whether attending poetry gatherings in black neighborhoods or staying in Arab and Druze villages in Israel or visiting a colleague in Ramallah (Palestine).

Founding Save the Mountain was an accident of geography. I had only been living in the neighborhood we saved for just over a year when a developer announced plans to destroy it. And my work this past summer on immigration justice was also an accident.

Yet, after all these years, I am still deeply involved in those first three issues that found me: peace, the environment, and democracy. I’ve changed the way I participate—for instance, speaking to the business community on how social change and environmental healing can be profitable—but they are still very much a part of who I am.

I am grateful to that long-ago young man, and I wish I knew his name to say thank-you. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without his speech.

When I started, I was told I was too young to make change, and now, at 62, I’m beginning to hear that I’m too old, But as teen activist Emma Gonzales would say, I “call B.S.” on both claims. Like many of my friends and mentors, I expect to continue being an activist into my 90s and even 100s, if I live that long.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

One of my marketing buddies, Marisa Murgatroyd, posted a picture of Greta Thunberg along with an inspirational message about how Greta’s work empowered Marisa to find her own place to make change.

Greta Thunberg on the cover of GQ, with commentary by Marisa Murgatroyd (Instagram screenshot)

It attracted a lot of comments, many of them expressing thanks for a great post–but others, far too many, dissing Greta and her work. Here’s my comment, in italics.

Thanks, Marisa, for posting this. Shocking how many people are posting to tear this young woman down because she’s changing the world. She will probably grow out of her extremism but if the world is lucky, she will keep her passion. I ask every person who is putting Greta down: what have you done in HER lifetime to make the world better, and what are you doing now toward that goal? Why is it important to you to spend your good energy attacking someone who is making a difference in the only ways she knows how?

And before you attack ME for using the word, “extremism,” remember this:

  1. This was a response to people who see her as an extremist. I used their own talking point to perhaps be listened to–to increase the chances that I might change a mind or two.
  2. Greta is acting out of deep despair. She does sound extreme at times. But let’s remember how hard it is to act out of despair, even if you don’t have Asperger’s (as she does). Positive motivators tend to work much better. To act from a dark place in a positive way is itself remarkable. In time, she will learn (as I did) that the world can be a very positive place, and we get the fun job of making it more positive, harnessing and amplifying the trends in the good directions, doing our best to neutralize the haters and the planet-killers. And that while the pace may seem glacial, we are actually winning.
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Guest post by Jacqueline Simonds.

Way back in 1979, I worked in a Texas bar & grill. One of my co-workers discovered she had Graves Disease/hyperthyroidism. She was put on a medication and her slightly bulging eyes and weight started to diminish.

Then she discovered she was pregnant.

[Recall that in 1979, there were no home pregnancy tests available. By the time she figured out she might be pregnant, and got into the doctor, she was maybe 2 – 2.5- months along. That’s 6 – 8.5 weeks.]

She told the doctor who was treating the thyroid, and he freaked. The medication she was taking would 100% result in a mangled fetus. He insisted she get an abortion – for the sake of her health, and her family.

My friend, a Latina, was also very very Catholic, and already had 3 children with her husband. This caused a terrible crisis for her. So she went to her priest, and told him what the doctor said. He immediately told her she couldn’t have the procedure, because it was against God.

My friend was completely wrecked by the moral and ethical challenges before her. What should she do? She understood the danger, but the priest said it was wrong. She cried all day at work.

She called her doctor and told him what the priest said. Then the doctor did something sort of amazing.

He called the priest and asked him to come to the office.

When they met, the doctor explained what was happening in my friend’s body. He showed the priest pictures of what a healthy developing fetus looked like, and what would happen to this one. And then he described, in great detail, the life my friend and her family would have. That my friend would have to quit work, and take full care of the child, for the rest of its life (caring for a medically-challenged child was even more financially and emotionally draining then than it is now).

But more, the doctor said, is that it might just kill her. Then her 3 children would be left without a mother, her husband without a wife, the parish without a devout member. And how did this serve God? How, he asked the priest, can you help her best? (He did not demand that the priest give in to the doctor’s way of thinking.)

The priest was astonished at all this information, and asked for time to go and pray. The doctor told him he encouraged him to do so, but not to take too much more time. The procedure had to be done soon.

The next day, the priest called my friend and told her he felt God wanted her to lay down the burden of the pregnancy, and that the priest himself would take her to the procedure.

And he did. And she was saved.

My friend suffered guilt and remorse and sorrow on a scale I could barely stand to watch. But with all of our love, she got through it.

If the conversation between the priest and the doctor seems unlikely to you, it is because times have changed that radically. We were on the middle path back in the 70s, where you could object to abortion, but see its necessity. When you could be pro-choice, but have an adult conversation that didn’t involve a screaming match – and therefore might change a mind.

Extremism erases rationality and damages real people. Right now, we HAVE to fight right wing pseudo-Christian extremism, because it is a toxic poison to women’s bodily autonomy. Once we can force the extremists back into the shadows, we can return to a time of the middle path, where your decision is YOURS.

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