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Tuesday, January 21, 2003
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Arthur Noll writes: Some might call this a worst case scenario, but it is the only future I see happening, not a matter of bleak or hopeful, but just how I see it. One can divide up our problems in two general categories. One set of problems is what is physically possible for us to do. The other set is what is psychologically possible. The two categories are related and will obviously interact with each other for the actual reality of what happens, but we can look at the two categories separately to try and understand what the reality will be. We know that we have a finite planet, and infinite growth of population and resource use is impossible without expanding beyond the planet. We also know we do not have the capacity to transcend the limits of the planet to the degree needed. At enormous expense a handful of people went to the moon, and found nothing to work with to make it even a baby step away for anyone else. This planet is all we have. We can see that food production is presently dependent on finite energy sources and so we are overpopulated. If people were to become aware of this problem, and decide to work together to solve it, we have things we could do. (01/22/03) | |
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Ted Trainer writes: The first important contribution we can all make to the transition to The Simpler Way is to talk constantly about the issues discussed in this document, to get them onto the public agenda. However by far the most valuable contribution that can be made is to help to establish alternative ways and settlements right where we live, so that more people in the mainstream will be able to see that there is a Simpler Way which is viable and attractive. Following is the sort of general strategy people could take up in their towns and suburbs. Form a Community Development Collective. A group must come together and form itself into a Community Development Collective (hereafter referred to as CDC.) Ideally the CDC will eventually develop into a mechanism for the participatory self-government of the town or suburb, but at first it might involve only a handful of individuals seeking to do some humble things. The CDC's initial goal is to identify and organise some of the locality’s unused productive resources of skill, energy, experience and good will so that people can start to produce some of the basic items they need. The most promising first step is for the CDC to set up a community garden and workshop. (01/22/03) | |
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Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote: Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us. Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live. ... A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. (01/22/03) | |
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After passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, Marin Luther King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow. Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power. "True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them. In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries." (01/22/03) | |
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Common Dreams -- Remember America? Land of the free? Thomas Jefferson and Co. thought the whole thing up. Woody Guthrie sang about it. Martin Luther King went to jail to lay claim to its promises. Millions have gloried in it, thrived in its light, dreamed of its liberty. Yet ever since terrorists shattered the calm of a September morning in 2001, America's image as freedom's citadel has been under siege. Who is attacking it? The last gang you'd expect. According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. government itself is exhibiting alarming disregard for traditional American rights. The government is so intent on tracking down terrorists, the monitoring group says, that it has come to see human rights as an obstacle to its mission. It's a foolish fixation -- not to mention cruel. The 600-plus Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, notes Tuesday's report, are being held "in a type of legal black hole" -- denied any guarantee of release at the end of "active hostilities" as required by the 1949 Geneva Convention. And that is just where the human-rights problems start: Since 9/11, the report asserts, "anyone could be picked up and detained forever," without charge or trial, as an "enemy combatant" -- merely on government say-so. This tactic has been used mostly against noncitizens, 1,200 of whom have been secretly imprisoned. Such policies are the stuff of dictatorships, not democracies. (01/22/03) | |
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Wired Magazine -- How will technology change our lives in the next 10 years? If scientists and analysts at the market research firm IDC are proven right, paraplegics will be able to walk thanks to sensors embedded in their legs that will receive directions from a computer. Doctors will monitor a person's vital signs through a computer that is connected to tiny sensors implanted inside the body. Buildings made of "nanotubes," or carbon particles that are a thousand times stronger than steel, will withstand virtually any natural disaster. And the Web will be intelligent enough to give users exactly what they are looking for: no more scouring hundreds of pages on Google. These are but a few of the predictions made by IDC last week about the technologies of the future, said John Gantz, chief research officer for IDC. While even IDC admits that some of these concepts are a bit far-fetched -- like molecular-level "nanomachines" that spin cloth, make buildings and manufacture prescription drugs. Other researchers and scientists agree that many of these ideas will eventually materialize. (01/22/03) | |
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CNN: Technology -- San Francisco became the first large municipality to outlaw the Segway Human Transporter on its sidewalks -- more than a month before the chariot-like vehicles are made available to the public. The Board of Supervisors acted last month following intense lobbying by Segway LLC in state capitols to change laws to permit the two-wheeled vehicles on sidewalks. Thirty-three states, including California, approved Segway-enabling legislation. But that doesn't mean major cities will roundly embrace the scooters touted by inventor Dean Kamen, when he introduced them to great fanfare in December 2001, as apt to "change civilization." California's law allows cities to opt out. (01/22/03) | |
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Washington Post -- France suggested today it would wage a major diplomatic fight, including possible use of its veto power, to prevent the U.N. Security Council from passing a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq. France's opposition to a war, emphatically delivered here by Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, is a major blow for the Bush administration, which has begun pouring tens of thousands of troops into the Persian Gulf in preparation for a military conflict this spring. The administration had hoped to mark the final phase in its confrontation with Iraq when U.N. weapons inspectors deliver a progress report Monday. But in a diplomatic version of an ambush, France and other countries used a high-level Security Council meeting on terrorism to lay down their markers for the debate that will commence next week on the inspectors' report. Russia and China, which have veto power, and Germany, which will chair the Security Council in February, also signaled today they were willing to let the inspections continue for months. (01/22/03) | |
10:29:24 PM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
2/2/2003; 7:50:40 AM.
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