Reflections for a New Year

This post is going to be a little different from my normal post something I find interesting and sometimes comment on it MO.

I want to write out some thoughts -- bear with me here, I know this might be rambling, but at this point in the Jewish calendar we are commanded to reflect, repent, and make amends. I always liked that we're required to make up with people, repay debts, apologize and fix relationships, and I love the idea of taking communal responsibility for sins - we chant a list of transgressions in unison, taking responsibility even if we, individually, may or may not have committed a particular act. But I also always found this Holy time to speak to internal reflection and a commitment to really challenging ourselves on a personal level to DO BETTER. Just do better! Care more! Make goals that are attainable and relevant and thoughtful! And then keep to them!

So my immediate resolutions for self-care this year were going to be: take my multivitamins, be more conscious of myself and my impact on those around me, and breathe more (as Eliza says, BREATHING IS GOOD!). But after a session last night with Rabbi David Rosenn, the Exec Director and Founder of AVODAH, I started thinking about what it means to reflect... how we tend to think of reflection as something to do once in a while instead of regularly, or something to do in free time rather than something we psychically need in order to survive. Rabbi Rosenn talked about how if we don't DEAL with challenges and dissonance through reflection we will accommodate those challenges into our existing frameworks and not actually learn or grow at all. Rather we need to deal with our discomfort and address it... And not just once a year.

I want this new year to culminate in a year's experience, not one day's experience 365 times.

I want to make a time for reflection, a set time, a purposeful time, and not to think of reflection time as a refuge from other times but rather to conceive of reflection as an ongoing dialogue and interaction between my consciousness and my (inter)active life. I hope that I make time to keep the theme of figuring out a way to forge/create/find common ground central to my existence. I need to find our humanity! At the MR 60th celebration the other night Rev Wright talked about putting the PEOPLE at the center.. if we keep the people at the center the world will look different. That seems so basic but is just ... not realized. I want this year to be a year of working towards putting the people at the center.

CT Action Event!

Thank you Lex!



You are invited to attend an Alliance Connecticut meeting

Friday, September 25, 2009

1:00pm – 3:00pm

Johnson Stewart Community Center

127 Martin Street, Hartford, CT 06120.

Please join us at the Alliance Connecticut meeting. Together we can create a stronger, safer and healthier Connecticut.

Drug Policies impinge on everyone in Connecticut from our children to our seniors. Resources are taken away from education, transportation, housing, treatment, prescription drug support and other areas to fund a public safety platform that ruins our communities and the lives of so many families. It’s time to do something new! It time for a holistic strategy for Connecticut!

Topic of discussion: Overdose Prevention-

What the law is now. What changes need to made.



This is a planning meeting to develop strategies around Overdose Prevention



Snacks will be provided. Please RSVP by September 21, 2009 with name(s) and contact information to LaResse Harvey laresseabwf@gmail.com or call 860-270-9585.

Basta!

This week, the CNN anchor broadcast his radio show from the conference of anti-immigrant hate group FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Founded by a white nationalist, FAIR was linked earlier this year to vigilantes in Arizona who brutally murdered 9-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father in their home.

The appearance at FAIR is just the latest example of Dobbs using his status as a CNN anchor to spread fear about Latinos and immigrants. It’s time we said ¡Basta! Enough is enough. Please join us in demanding that CNN drop Dobbs from its network:

BastaDobbs.com/Action

Dobbs’ network, CNN, calls itself “The Most Trusted Name in News.” But Dobbs has shown that the only thing he can be trusted to do is to spread dangerous, false myths about immigrants, to give airtime to extremists, and to use dehumanizing and disrespectful language towards our community.

For example, Dobbs has blamed Latino immigrants for an alleged leprosy epidemic that was widely debunked, and has insinuated high crime rates by Latinos falsely claiming “illegal aliens” make up a third of the prison population. Dobbs also regularly hosts extremist guests like FAIR, the Minutemen, and Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who he called “a model for the whole country.”

The Dobbs threat to Latinos is real. Here is how Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center described it to us:

How dangerous is Lou Dobbs? The rise in hate crimes against Latinos coincides almost exactly with the time Dobbs has been propagating false conspiracy theories about Latinos on the air. He’s not urging people to go hurt and kill - but that is the effect of what he does.

To fight back against Dobbs, Presente.org is launching a new campaign, working with dozens of leading Latino organizations and our allies in cities across the country — from Los Angeles to Phoenix to Orlando. We are joining together to demand that CNN no longer allow Dobbs to spew hate thinly disguised as “news.”

Please join us in saying “¡basta!” and ask your friends and family to do the same. It only takes a moment:

BastaDobbs.com/Action

Thank you and Adelante!
The Presente.org team

Bagram has been seriously and totally messed up for years, despite US denials of foul play. Numerous reports and documentaries talk about the horrors that go on there. I was so excited last week when the NYTimes recently reported on the Obama administration's plans to implement new (read: any) rights for detainees at Bagram:

The new Pentagon guidelines would assign a United States military official to each of the roughly 600 detainees at the American-run prison at the Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. These officials would not be lawyers but could for the first time gather witnesses and evidence, including classified material, on behalf of the detainees to challenge their detention in proceedings before a military-appointed review board.

Some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as six years. And unlike the prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba, these detainees have had no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as “enemy combatants,” military officials said.

An article from Al-Jazeera English quoted Ramzi Kassem, a law professor at City University of New York and attorney for a Bagram detainee, who said the move is just "window dressing".

"The whole thing was meant to pull the wool over the eyes of the judicial system,'' he told The Associated Press.

"These changes don't come anywhere near an adequate substitute for a real review."

Whatever I was still pumped about even the beginnings of a change until yesterday I read this in an ACLU press release:

The Obama administration has filed a brief with a federal appeals court in Washington arguing that the approximately 600 detainees in U.S. custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan are not entitled to have their cases heard in U.S. courts. Some of the detainees at Bagram have been held for up to six years with no meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention, and there are some prisoners there who are unconnected to the war in Afghanistan but who have been sent there from locations around the world.

WHY OBAMA WHY. I don't understand the madness. Is there any way to stop dehumanizing people? I am interested specifically in how the law systematically dehumanizes people and deprives them of their rights - I've been thinking about that a lot at my job at the NY Legal Assistance Group and as I'm studying for the LSATs. The law doesn't seem to account for humanity, and indeed seems to try to mask legal rights in obscure language and self-referential textual codes that prevent anyone from understanding a) how few rights they actually have and b) what those rights that they do have are. Is there a way to be a radical lawyer? Is there a way to redistribute information and access? Is it worthwhile or meaningful if it's to a system that is deeply flawed??

It's been a while

I lost internet access when I moved to NYC but now I'm back and better than ever.

I think that this article slamming Apple is a really interesting expose. Consumer responsibility may be something that I think about when I buy my food or clothing, but electronics are not an area that I usually consider, especially when I think about ipods or other dominant products. But it's also interesting to think about how widely consumed products like ipods can be influenced by the collective voice of the consumers -- perhaps we have more power to protest since ipods are so dominant?? Thoughts? Does that make any sense to anyone but me?

Why Not to Buy a New Computer for College

by Deena Guzder

The beginning of the academic year once meant new clothes, shoes, and notebooks. These days, it increasingly means new computers, iPods, and mobile phones. One company, Apple, is giving away a "free" iPod to every student, faculty, and staff who buys a MacBook. The word "free" is terribly deceptive. The human cost of mineral extraction in the high-tech industry remains intolerable. A report released earlier this year by Global Witness delineates how multinational companies are pillaging natural resources and fueling holocaust in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The organization warns that corporations, politicians, military, and militia groups in the Congo have plundered the country's natural wealth and used it to enrich themselves to the detriment of the local population. The research team conducting the report says it found evidence that the mineral trade is far more pervasive and lucrative than previously suspected. Global Witness, which is the same nongovernmental organization that brought worldwide attention to the blood diamond industry, also documented life-threatening labor conditions in the Congo's natural resource sector.