Dear all,
As a follow-up to my last post on money, I want to invite everyone in the Philadelphia area to a meeting I’m hosting this Sunday afternoon on public banking, to learn about the issue in general and an exciting local campaign in particular. (Go to https://www.facebook.com/events/1929190444043036/ for more information.)
I’m pacing myself to be ready to fly with Chuck to Uganda for three weeks on the Monday after Thanksgiving, trying to be diligent about my long to-do list, at the same time staying in the present—pulling the last carrots with a grandchild, watching the gingko leaves turn yellow and start to fall, being alert for things that give me hope in this troubled world.
Love
Pamela
For what we get
I’ve had no use for picky eaters
who ask for help on the street
and should be thankful
for what they get.
And then I got to know one—
moving from eye contact and smile
to the occasional dollar,
from introductions to chat.
(He remembered my birthday,
sang out on the street,
made my day.)
I learned his bagel of choice.
It is a small thing to buy
the ones he prefers
and make a sandwich
as I make my lunch.
Cinnamon raisin?
he asks hopefully
With cream cheese?
Of course, I say.
At least he gets his way
in one small thing.
Indigenous diet
By all rights, I should be a vegetarian. I never buy meat or cook with it (unless someone has left a chicken carcass that can be made into soup). The inhumanity of big meat and poultry operations sickens me, and I’m clear about the need to eat lower on the food chain for the sake of our future on this planet. I understand the health benefits of a vegetable-based diet, and prefer vegetarian dishes to ones with big chunks of meat. And I identify with the culture that enfolds vegetarianism in many ways.
Yet I’m not a vegetarian, and am uncomfortable when it is held out as the more righteous path. When the choice relates to individual purity, I struggle with solutions that have us focusing just on our own bodies, rather than out to the larger body of which we are all a part. Even when it is embedded in larger social justice goals that I share, I still can’t quite join in.
I haven’t had a name for the way I eat, though it’s modeled on diets in the Third World—vegetable-based, with meat as a flavor-enhancer or a treat for special occasions. With this choice linked to an intention to live in right relationship with the earth, I’m looking more and more for guidance from indigenous people. As I listen to what they have to say about eating, I’m not hearing much about being vegetarian.
On the one hand, a Native woman I know gets irritated and impatient when white/settler vegetarians suggest that gatherings of those who care about the environment should not include meat. “Don’t tell me what I should or shouldn’t eat”, she says. “If you really care about the future of the earth, go out and cut your consumption of everything in half.”
On the other hand, indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer challenges the distinction between animal and plant life. “We are all living beings,” she says. Humans don’t stand lonely at the top of the pyramid, with the animals just below and the plants far down at the bottom. Rather, we are part of a circular web of life, where every part is important and everything we eat is our living relative.
The plants are not just our relatives, but our teachers, she says, the only ones who can take sunlight and water and make food. Rather than saying that some living beings are okay to eat and others are not, she encourages us to focus on “the honorable harvest”. This involves cultivating an attitude of respect toward the life you intend to take, giving thanks, taking no more than you need, and leaving enough that its kind can continue to flourish. Animals who have a place of giving and receiving in a local ecosystem, and those living in areas that don’t support plant food, can be part of an honorable harvest that sustains the earth as well.
I see some big issues for us here. One is respect. What does it mean to be respectful of the food we put in our bodies, respectful of the role it plays in sustaining our lives and the life of others and of the role we are called to play in return? For those who eat meat, what would it require to give up factory and feedlot products, which are produced with such profound disrespect for the animals? What would it mean to give up the assumption that we are entitled to eat meat?
Another is humility. Since animals are more like us, it’s easier to think of them as relatively more special. How can we humble ourselves and acknowledge the plants as our relations as well?
A third is responsibility. Some of us refuse to eat meat to free ourselves from the responsibility of participating in the taking of another life. But this is a false freedom. Not only are the plants equally alive, but that attempt to hold ourselves separate and uninvolved obscures a reality that we avoid at our peril. We are part of this web of life, and we must learn to be responsible as fully-connected members, rather than as outside actors.
There is a growing interest in learning from indigenous wisdom as we struggle to change the habits and systems that are contributing to an untenable future on earth. I hope that we can learn to follow in this area as well.
Dare to imagine—a new economy is possible!
Electric Cars
While electric cars still make up only 1 percent of all vehicles on the road in the U.S. (compared with about 5 percent in China and 39 percent in Norway) that number is on the rise. Zero-emission vehicles make up almost 5 percent of the California market, and the West Coast Electric Highway now makes it possible to drove a zero emissions vehicle from Baja California to British Columbia, charging as needed at stations spaced every 25-50 miles along the highway.
In 2011, when the first charging station of the West Coast Electric Highway was installed, the Department of Energy counted 687 charging stations throughout the United States. As of July 1018, there are now about 52,000 public charging stations and outlets. To put it in perspective, that’s more than one-third the number of gasoline stations—about 150,000—in the entire country.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-west-coast-electric-highway-enables-zero-emission-road-trips-20180720?
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The 267,000 people in Los Angeles who voted to establish a public bank, in a dramatic paradigm shift in voter awareness and after a mere four months of grassroots effort.
http://www.publicbankinginstitute.org/over_a_quarter_of_a_million_people_voted_yesonb_42_support_the_citys_measure_for_a_public_bank
The 1.5 million Floridians with past felony convictions who will once again have the right to vote, thanks to an impassioned grassroots referendum campaign,
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/audience/shannon-green/os-ae-desmond-meade-amendment-4-criminal-justice-20181107-story.html
30 young environmental leaders from all across Vietnam who were part of a leadership camp, the fourth in six years, to be trained to become climate organizers and campaigners in their country.
https://350.org/vietnamese-youths-who-rise-for-climate/?akid=51665.1048214.jiscm_&rd=1&t=17
The clarity and passion of a young black man speaking out on the need to stand with and for women.
https://www.facebook.com/adam.zwar/videos/178594569682973/UzpfSTcxOTkwNTY4NjoxMDE1NTg5NjM2MDEzNTY4Nw/?notif_id=1538869226291659¬if_t=feedback_reaction_generic
Resources
Money and Soul
A transcript of a keynote address I delivered at a Quaker conference in New Mexico, June 2017
https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged
Toward a Right Relationship with Finance
Check out this new book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.
The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth. However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy. This book:
• offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
• frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
• suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
• invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness? Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?
To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.
More resources
www.findingsteadyground.org
Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide. http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide
Posts on other web/blog sites:
In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.
http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust
http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby
Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years: https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)
