Dear all,
At a workshop I went to in May, I got a clearer picture of the relationship between looking squarely at our earliest childhood defeats—which often involved settling for disconnection—and reclaiming our ability to act on our full power in the present. I’m excited about moving forward with a vision that more is possible.
And I had a lovely conversation with our five-year-old grandson the other day about what makes a family and how you can decide that people are part of your family. I give thanks for family that has extended beyond biology—through our neighborhood to other parts of the country and across the ocean. There’s more potential for loss of course, but overall, what a blessing!
Love,
Pamela
On bail
As one small step in the long journey to end mass incarceration, several of us ventured through a metal detector and down a flight of stairs to the small basement room in our city where bail hearings take place. There we found the court players separated by a glass wall from a few benches for observers. Each of them works with a long computer list of names, with access to the nature of the charges. There are tall stacks of thick reports as well. People who have been arrested appear via a video screen from where they are being held at different police districts around the city.
Many of the individual hearings take less than a minute. The bail commissioner, or magistrate, verifies the person’s name, reads the charges, lets them know their court date and warns that if they don’t show up a warrant will be issued for their arrest. Then comes the question of bail. Sometimes this is done with minimal consultation. With a simple DUI or drug possession case, the person is often now released on their own recognizance—signing for bail without having to pay anything. Sometimes the commissioner wants more information and enquires about previous arrests or detainers (requests that a person be held in relation to another charge). Sometimes it’s more complex. The DA’s representative suggests a bail amount, the Public Defender counters. The commissioner may ask for their reasoning. Then s/he decides, announces the amount of the bail, and the next person in line is brought in.
We learned from a fellow observer at the second session that the hearings are held every four hours, 24 hours a day, with different court personnel rotating in and out. With such a steep learning curve, all we could do at first was try to follow along. By the end of the afternoon, however, we had gotten our bearings and could start to reflect on the nature of what we were witnessing.
Everyone was focused on “just the facts”, as the conveyor belt on their assembly-line job brought an endless stream of human misery—oppression, straitened circumstances, addiction, poor judgment. The one sign of shared humanity we witnessed was with a veteran charged with DUI and damage of another vehicle. The commissioner probed to learn that he had served in Afghanistan, made a point of telling him about court programs for veterans, and thanked him for his service.
It was hard to watch people attempting to dispense justice in the midst of such an unjust system. There was no uniform treatment here. The commissioner and DA’s rep in the second session were both much more punitive than those in the first. At one point, the latter recommended a bail of $300,000! That the commissioner came down to $50,000 was probably of scant comfort to the guy on the screen. The $5000 required up front was clearly beyond his reach or the reach of anybody else we saw that day. Even the challenge of finding $500 for bail of $5000 would keep most of these folks in jail or send them straight to the bail bondsmen and their extortionate rates.
Did any of the thirty or forty people we observed need to be behind bars before their arraignment? Maybe the guy who had missed 23 of his last 26 court appearances. Possibly the two who had threatened family members. If so, then why not just say that those few are too much of a danger to society, rather than using a bail system that punishes the poor and lets the rich buy their way out? In the bigger picture, the people who are seriously endangering us and eroding the quality of life in our country have fat wallets, work in high places and would never be caught by this system.
I carry the weight of what we witnessed with me. How can those of us who have some protection from this part of our penal system (I hesitate to call it criminal justice) take in its enormity? How can we face squarely the incredible injustice and pain that permeate it, and acknowledge how we have acquiesced to its existence? In a situation where silence implies consent, what needs to happen for us to speak out?
Scorning fear
The shirt in the pricey store window
was designed to jar the eye.
Did its creator feel a flutter of fear
in making that bold choice?
Was it sweet to scorn the fear
and forge ahead?
We need our courage.
If only it could be harnessed
to a higher good
than fashion.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Carbon neutral steel production
Producing one ton of steel generates 600 kg of other materials Рincluding carbon, slag, dust, sludge, heat and gases. ArcelorMittal Tubaṛo, a Brazilian steel plant is now leading the industry in selling and reusing internally around 90% of what was previously categorized as waste.
Both new production and recycling of used steel requires significant energy. The use of charcoal in steel production is common practice in Brazil. However, badly managed timber extraction can rapidly increase the rate of deforestation, with its many damaging environmental impacts. ArcelorMittal BioFlorestas has been cultivating renewable eucalyptus forests, rebuilding soils, and improving the overall health of the ecosystem, while using the charcoal to create ‘carbon neutral steel’; the carbon sequestration during the growth of the forest matches or even exceeds the carbon released during combustion for the steel production process.
https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/case-studies/new-entry
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
The European Union’s agreement on a total ban on bee-harming pesticides
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/27/eu-agrees-total-ban-on-bee-harming-pesticides
American Samoa’s success in finally getting their own full-service bank — and renewing energy for public banking in the United States.
https://www.americanbanker.com/news/american-samoa-finally-gets-a-public-bank-and-us-states-are-watching
New Zealand’s ban on all new offshore oil exploration as part of a 'carbon-neutral future'
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/12/new-zealand-bans-all-new-offshore-oil-exploration-as-part-of-carbon-neutral-future
and New Jersey’s ban on offshore drilling.
http://observer.com/2018/04/phil-murphy-signs-bill-banning-offshore-drilling-new-jersey/
An indigenous town in Mexico that banned outside politicians, so they could address their own issues in their own ways.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/mexico-indigenous-town-banned-politicians-cheran
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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Sunday, June 3, 2018
Monday, March 19, 2018
#176 Town Hall
Dear all,
Well, I finally got rid of my two-month cough, which turned out to be pneumonia (again!). What a pleasure to feel healthy! A sweet moment was when my colleagues at our big two-day annual work conference sent me home to bed in no uncertain terms. I keep learning more about noticing and taking in the love and help that is available around me.
Some of you contributed to the project of a young man I know in Northern Uganda who was raising money to make a documentary on the environmental impact of charcoal-burning. His 16-minute video is now available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPz2g18DLxU&feature=youtu.be
On the eve of the first day of spring arrives, a winter storm is headed our way. Yet we know that spring will prevail.
Love,
Pamela
Town hall
When we arrived at the neighborhood rec center for the town hall More and more chairs were brought in to accommodate the growing crowd, and still people were left standing. Clearly the topic of cash bail hits a nerve in this neighborhood.
The town meeting was hosted by two progressive-minded city They had invited our new District Attorney, the head of the Defenders Association, a Mayor’s representative on criminal justice reform, and representatives of several community organizations that are working to end cash bail.
The feisty determination of both the new DA and the Public Defender to change the system was heartening. I kept being surprised at how neither of them (a white man and a black woman) sounded like politicians or bureaucrats; it was more like they were zealots on a common mission.
The crowd was certainly with them, ready to be led and ready to pull them ahead even faster and farther. It was this crowd—and my part in it—that really caught my attention. I’m still puzzling over how I could have remained so deeply ignorant of the impact of this issue for so long. I remember disagreeing with the policies of an earlier DA with a reputation for being “tough on crime”, but now I was hearing from a mother in the row directly behind us about her son who was locked up at age 15 by this DA many years ago and has been in jail ever since. She is my neighbor. How could I be so insulated from her pain?
In this room, only a mile from home, I was finally experiencing the raw reality of the weight of mass incarceration in my community. It was the difference between having information about wrongs and being witness to them. Three mothers spoke, clearly in a never-ending and passionate quest for justice for their sons. How had I failed to be under the weight of this injustice, failed to take into my heart how families are still being ripped apart by a system that started with slavery and morphed almost seamlessly into mass incarceration?
I remember the shock of learning several years ago how towns like Ferguson, Missouri fill their coffers by extorting traffic fines from their minority neighborhoods. I am embarrassed that I have only recently educated myself on cash bail—a system where the innocent poor can languish in jail for months waiting for trial while the guilty rich simply buy their freedom. But this evening we learned together about another layer of injustice; we learned that 30% of all posted bail is kept by the city—whether the person is taken to trial, proved innocent or not.
I was present as the reality of this outrage took shape and gained weight before our eyes: the meager resources of those who have the least are being pillaged to support the system that oppresses them.
We didn’t know. Even the City Councilman, a guy who said he might have ended up in jail himself if somebody hadn’t offered him another path, didn’t know. How could we not know these things? What forces have allowed us to accept such a system as inevitable? Are those who have been victimized by it too inured to oppression and injustice to speak up? Are those who haven’t been personally touched by its horrors too buffered from inconvenient truths, or too invested in not knowing?
Learning and knowing hard things can be painful. But we don’t have to learn or know them, or act on what we have learned, alone. And choosing to not know is way worse. The opportunity to be with my neighbors as we looked squarely at this system together, and united in an intention to change it, was a gift.
Welcome and farewell
Welcome the tiny crocuses
new sprouts of green
astonishing warmth of sun
on my cheek.
Farewell the clear line
of tree branches
against the sky.
Love of what is
giving way to
love of what is to come.
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Reclaiming Public Services
Cities and towns that want well-run water and sanitation services, low-cost access to the internet, and affordable housing should keep those operations public or run by local nonprofits, or “re-municipalize” them if necessary, a new report from the Netherlands has found.
Based on research involving 1,600 cities in 45 countries that have chosen public ownership over corporate ownership, especially of their energy and water systems, “(re)municipalisations generally succeeded in bringing down costs and tariffs, improving conditions for workers and boosting service quality, while ensuring greater transparency and accountability”. Both Hamburg, Germany, and Boulder, Colorado, for example, are making their electric power enterprises public in order to shift to green and renewable energy sources.
https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/reclaiming_public_services.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The declaration of Colombia’s Constitutional Court that the Atrato River basin possesses rights to “protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration”, challenging the assumption that nature is “property” that is right-less under the law (as has been the case with women and enslaved people).
https://celdf.org/2017/05/press-release-colombia-constitutional-court-finds-atrato-river-possesses-rights/?utm_source=Press%20Release&utm_medium=PowerMail&utm_campaign=PR
The growing interest (among former debt collectors and TV personalities) in buying up people’s medical debt at pennies on the dollar, in order to forgive it.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/tv-stations-follow-john-olivers-lead-in-the-movement-to-forgive-medical-debt-20180301
The energy in my city, from the grassroots to the District Attorney and chief Public Defender to members of City Council and the Mayor for addressing the terrible injustices in our court and prison system.
http://www.philly.com/archive/samantha_melamed/krasner-cash-bail-philadelphia-reform-district-attorney-20180319.html
The new movies, Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time, which offer widely accessible and impactful corrections to deeply-held and damaging stereotypes about black people and women.
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Well, I finally got rid of my two-month cough, which turned out to be pneumonia (again!). What a pleasure to feel healthy! A sweet moment was when my colleagues at our big two-day annual work conference sent me home to bed in no uncertain terms. I keep learning more about noticing and taking in the love and help that is available around me.
Some of you contributed to the project of a young man I know in Northern Uganda who was raising money to make a documentary on the environmental impact of charcoal-burning. His 16-minute video is now available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPz2g18DLxU&feature=youtu.be
On the eve of the first day of spring arrives, a winter storm is headed our way. Yet we know that spring will prevail.
Love,
Pamela
Town hall
When we arrived at the neighborhood rec center for the town hall More and more chairs were brought in to accommodate the growing crowd, and still people were left standing. Clearly the topic of cash bail hits a nerve in this neighborhood.
The town meeting was hosted by two progressive-minded city They had invited our new District Attorney, the head of the Defenders Association, a Mayor’s representative on criminal justice reform, and representatives of several community organizations that are working to end cash bail.
The feisty determination of both the new DA and the Public Defender to change the system was heartening. I kept being surprised at how neither of them (a white man and a black woman) sounded like politicians or bureaucrats; it was more like they were zealots on a common mission.
The crowd was certainly with them, ready to be led and ready to pull them ahead even faster and farther. It was this crowd—and my part in it—that really caught my attention. I’m still puzzling over how I could have remained so deeply ignorant of the impact of this issue for so long. I remember disagreeing with the policies of an earlier DA with a reputation for being “tough on crime”, but now I was hearing from a mother in the row directly behind us about her son who was locked up at age 15 by this DA many years ago and has been in jail ever since. She is my neighbor. How could I be so insulated from her pain?
In this room, only a mile from home, I was finally experiencing the raw reality of the weight of mass incarceration in my community. It was the difference between having information about wrongs and being witness to them. Three mothers spoke, clearly in a never-ending and passionate quest for justice for their sons. How had I failed to be under the weight of this injustice, failed to take into my heart how families are still being ripped apart by a system that started with slavery and morphed almost seamlessly into mass incarceration?
I remember the shock of learning several years ago how towns like Ferguson, Missouri fill their coffers by extorting traffic fines from their minority neighborhoods. I am embarrassed that I have only recently educated myself on cash bail—a system where the innocent poor can languish in jail for months waiting for trial while the guilty rich simply buy their freedom. But this evening we learned together about another layer of injustice; we learned that 30% of all posted bail is kept by the city—whether the person is taken to trial, proved innocent or not.
I was present as the reality of this outrage took shape and gained weight before our eyes: the meager resources of those who have the least are being pillaged to support the system that oppresses them.
We didn’t know. Even the City Councilman, a guy who said he might have ended up in jail himself if somebody hadn’t offered him another path, didn’t know. How could we not know these things? What forces have allowed us to accept such a system as inevitable? Are those who have been victimized by it too inured to oppression and injustice to speak up? Are those who haven’t been personally touched by its horrors too buffered from inconvenient truths, or too invested in not knowing?
Learning and knowing hard things can be painful. But we don’t have to learn or know them, or act on what we have learned, alone. And choosing to not know is way worse. The opportunity to be with my neighbors as we looked squarely at this system together, and united in an intention to change it, was a gift.
Welcome and farewell
Welcome the tiny crocuses
new sprouts of green
astonishing warmth of sun
on my cheek.
Farewell the clear line
of tree branches
against the sky.
Love of what is
giving way to
love of what is to come.
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Reclaiming Public Services
Cities and towns that want well-run water and sanitation services, low-cost access to the internet, and affordable housing should keep those operations public or run by local nonprofits, or “re-municipalize” them if necessary, a new report from the Netherlands has found.
Based on research involving 1,600 cities in 45 countries that have chosen public ownership over corporate ownership, especially of their energy and water systems, “(re)municipalisations generally succeeded in bringing down costs and tariffs, improving conditions for workers and boosting service quality, while ensuring greater transparency and accountability”. Both Hamburg, Germany, and Boulder, Colorado, for example, are making their electric power enterprises public in order to shift to green and renewable energy sources.
https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/reclaiming_public_services.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The declaration of Colombia’s Constitutional Court that the Atrato River basin possesses rights to “protection, conservation, maintenance, and restoration”, challenging the assumption that nature is “property” that is right-less under the law (as has been the case with women and enslaved people).
https://celdf.org/2017/05/press-release-colombia-constitutional-court-finds-atrato-river-possesses-rights/?utm_source=Press%20Release&utm_medium=PowerMail&utm_campaign=PR
The growing interest (among former debt collectors and TV personalities) in buying up people’s medical debt at pennies on the dollar, in order to forgive it.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/tv-stations-follow-john-olivers-lead-in-the-movement-to-forgive-medical-debt-20180301
The energy in my city, from the grassroots to the District Attorney and chief Public Defender to members of City Council and the Mayor for addressing the terrible injustices in our court and prison system.
http://www.philly.com/archive/samantha_melamed/krasner-cash-bail-philadelphia-reform-district-attorney-20180319.html
The new movies, Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time, which offer widely accessible and impactful corrections to deeply-held and damaging stereotypes about black people and women.
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Sunday, February 18, 2018
#175 In focus
Dear all,
I had a lovely time in the days before Valentines Day sending out our annual love letter to many many friends. With each name I felt the connection and was grateful to have that person in my life. (If you’d like to read it, just let me know.)
This has been an intense month of writing for me, following through on my summer speaking adventure in the Southwest with three projects on faith, economics and community. Winter is a great season for writing, but I’m hoping to wrap them up soon, since my mind/heart is beginning to turn toward the spring. So I wish you, as well, the joys of winter and the pleasures of anticipating spring.
Love,
Pamela
In focus
There is something about being in a very different culture that gives the connections one is able to make—across great differences in life experience—an extra sweetness and poignancy. My relationship with one young man in Northern Uganda stands out. Somehow we were able to find each other. You could call it a miracle. None of the host of forces that can so easily block one human being’s access to another was able to prevail. Without the distractions and assumptions of daily life at home, I was reaching for connection and ready to see. After years as an orphan, being treated as an inconvenience and a burden, he was more than ready to be seen. The love in two hearts found a way to flow clear and unobstructed, as refreshing as good water in parched earth.
I believe it was a miracle, as it continues to be. And I am starting to believe that such miracles are waiting to be found at every turn. Just as this young man came into such clear focus for me, in all his goodness and worth, I think this is something we would all want and choose with everyone. The key is to bring our loving attention to the challenge of focusing in on the reality of another human being.
So, what does it mean to see people in focus? Perhaps the better question is what gets in our way? Sometimes we just don’t see at all. Our attention may be focused so far out, on the great mysteries or evils of the world, that the people close in around us are just a blur. Conversely, it may be focused so deep within, on our own internal state, that we can’t really see anybody outside of ourselves clearly. In neither case is our focus on the people in our midst, and we catch glimpses of them only by chance.
Sometimes we are ready to focus at that range but, rather than putting attention to what is actually happening for the person in front of us, we look to see a reflection of what we want or need. This often happens with babies. In our eagerness to take in a vision of precious innocence and sweetness that nourishes our souls, we may totally miss seeing that individual human being and what they are showing on their own behalf. Or we look at a potential romantic partner, not as he or she actually is, but as a reflection of our own hopes and dreams.
We may know that there’s a real live person in front of us whom we could theoretically look at, but just not be able to face what we would see if we looked. Maybe they are hurting too much for us to know how to take it in. Maybe we feel inadequate in response to their needs. Maybe they remind us of our failings, or call out anger that we don’t know how to control. So we blur our vision intentionally or turn away.
Sometimes, our intention is to be present and have the other person in focus, but we’re trying to do other things at the same time. This can easily happen to parents, trying to catch enough of the drift of what a child is doing or saying that we can respond appropriately, as we try at the same time to attend to another task. Or we converse with somebody while our minds are being tugged by our cell phones or our worries or by somebody else who is in the room.
All of these are real challenges. But I’m finding myself taken by the power of what can happen when we choose to not be limited by them, and dare to put our full attention to the person in front of us. Being seen that way, in full focus, will surely be a gift to them. For some it will be another always-welcome affirmation that they have been seen. For others it may be life-changing, like the water on dry earth that allows a struggling plant to bloom.
But perhaps more important, really seeing others is a gift to us. (I remember going into cataract surgery with vision in one eye so cloudy that I couldn’t distinguish faces and coming out to find the world crystal clear. Talk about miracles!) Though it may be painful, and may require us to grieve, ultimately seeing calls out our love. And that means more love, not only out in the world, but at our disposal in our hearts.
Catching the wind
Far from the daily cares of home
Beauty all around
A hard task to do, but do-able
Loving people gathered round.
The wind fills my sails
I lean out
Balanced, intent
In motion
At rest.
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Investing locally
The City Council of Preston, in northern England, inspired by the work of The Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland, Ohio with the Evergreen Cooperatives, has returned almost £200 million to the Lancashire economy and supported more than 1,600 jobs by using the town’s anchor institutions and local government contracts to keep money in the local economy and develop worker-owned cooperatives.
Preston council's local economic development strategy includes:
• Becoming the first Living Wage employer in the North of England (in 2012);
• Setting up a credit union to compete with payday loans companies;
• Persuading six large local public bodies, or “anchor institutions”, to commit to buying goods or services locally wherever possible;
• Helping to set up worker cooperatives to provide goods and services to public bodies.
In 2013, the six local public bodies spent £38m in Preston and £292m in all of Lancashire. By 2017 these had increased to £111m and £486m respectively, despite an overall reduction in the council’s budget.
https://democracycollaborative.org/content/democracy-collaborative-joins-jeremy-corbyns-new-community-wealth-building-unit-advisors
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
Washington state Governor Jay Inslee’s rejection of a permit to build what would have been the nation’s largest oil-by-rail terminal.
https://earther.com/washington-governor-shuts-down-gigantic-fossil-fuel-pro-1822527972
The Uruguay Care Act, under which all children, persons with disabilities and elderly persons, have the right to get care, with the state not only providing care services but also guaranteeing their quality by providing training and regulations.
http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2017/2/feature-uruguay-care-law
The action by the French parliament to ban all production of oil and gas by 2040.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/20/france-bans-fracking-and-oil-extraction-in-all-of-its-territories
A wise, funny and compassionate open letter to Louis C.K. on sexual harassment by a NYC theater artist.
https://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2018/01/03/youre-my-sexist-dumbass-louis-c-k-and-heres-what-i-need-from-you-now/
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
I had a lovely time in the days before Valentines Day sending out our annual love letter to many many friends. With each name I felt the connection and was grateful to have that person in my life. (If you’d like to read it, just let me know.)
This has been an intense month of writing for me, following through on my summer speaking adventure in the Southwest with three projects on faith, economics and community. Winter is a great season for writing, but I’m hoping to wrap them up soon, since my mind/heart is beginning to turn toward the spring. So I wish you, as well, the joys of winter and the pleasures of anticipating spring.
Love,
Pamela
In focus
There is something about being in a very different culture that gives the connections one is able to make—across great differences in life experience—an extra sweetness and poignancy. My relationship with one young man in Northern Uganda stands out. Somehow we were able to find each other. You could call it a miracle. None of the host of forces that can so easily block one human being’s access to another was able to prevail. Without the distractions and assumptions of daily life at home, I was reaching for connection and ready to see. After years as an orphan, being treated as an inconvenience and a burden, he was more than ready to be seen. The love in two hearts found a way to flow clear and unobstructed, as refreshing as good water in parched earth.
I believe it was a miracle, as it continues to be. And I am starting to believe that such miracles are waiting to be found at every turn. Just as this young man came into such clear focus for me, in all his goodness and worth, I think this is something we would all want and choose with everyone. The key is to bring our loving attention to the challenge of focusing in on the reality of another human being.
So, what does it mean to see people in focus? Perhaps the better question is what gets in our way? Sometimes we just don’t see at all. Our attention may be focused so far out, on the great mysteries or evils of the world, that the people close in around us are just a blur. Conversely, it may be focused so deep within, on our own internal state, that we can’t really see anybody outside of ourselves clearly. In neither case is our focus on the people in our midst, and we catch glimpses of them only by chance.
Sometimes we are ready to focus at that range but, rather than putting attention to what is actually happening for the person in front of us, we look to see a reflection of what we want or need. This often happens with babies. In our eagerness to take in a vision of precious innocence and sweetness that nourishes our souls, we may totally miss seeing that individual human being and what they are showing on their own behalf. Or we look at a potential romantic partner, not as he or she actually is, but as a reflection of our own hopes and dreams.
We may know that there’s a real live person in front of us whom we could theoretically look at, but just not be able to face what we would see if we looked. Maybe they are hurting too much for us to know how to take it in. Maybe we feel inadequate in response to their needs. Maybe they remind us of our failings, or call out anger that we don’t know how to control. So we blur our vision intentionally or turn away.
Sometimes, our intention is to be present and have the other person in focus, but we’re trying to do other things at the same time. This can easily happen to parents, trying to catch enough of the drift of what a child is doing or saying that we can respond appropriately, as we try at the same time to attend to another task. Or we converse with somebody while our minds are being tugged by our cell phones or our worries or by somebody else who is in the room.
All of these are real challenges. But I’m finding myself taken by the power of what can happen when we choose to not be limited by them, and dare to put our full attention to the person in front of us. Being seen that way, in full focus, will surely be a gift to them. For some it will be another always-welcome affirmation that they have been seen. For others it may be life-changing, like the water on dry earth that allows a struggling plant to bloom.
But perhaps more important, really seeing others is a gift to us. (I remember going into cataract surgery with vision in one eye so cloudy that I couldn’t distinguish faces and coming out to find the world crystal clear. Talk about miracles!) Though it may be painful, and may require us to grieve, ultimately seeing calls out our love. And that means more love, not only out in the world, but at our disposal in our hearts.
Catching the wind
Far from the daily cares of home
Beauty all around
A hard task to do, but do-able
Loving people gathered round.
The wind fills my sails
I lean out
Balanced, intent
In motion
At rest.
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Investing locally
The City Council of Preston, in northern England, inspired by the work of The Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland, Ohio with the Evergreen Cooperatives, has returned almost £200 million to the Lancashire economy and supported more than 1,600 jobs by using the town’s anchor institutions and local government contracts to keep money in the local economy and develop worker-owned cooperatives.
Preston council's local economic development strategy includes:
• Becoming the first Living Wage employer in the North of England (in 2012);
• Setting up a credit union to compete with payday loans companies;
• Persuading six large local public bodies, or “anchor institutions”, to commit to buying goods or services locally wherever possible;
• Helping to set up worker cooperatives to provide goods and services to public bodies.
In 2013, the six local public bodies spent £38m in Preston and £292m in all of Lancashire. By 2017 these had increased to £111m and £486m respectively, despite an overall reduction in the council’s budget.
https://democracycollaborative.org/content/democracy-collaborative-joins-jeremy-corbyns-new-community-wealth-building-unit-advisors
Some things that have made me hopeful recently:
Washington state Governor Jay Inslee’s rejection of a permit to build what would have been the nation’s largest oil-by-rail terminal.
https://earther.com/washington-governor-shuts-down-gigantic-fossil-fuel-pro-1822527972
The Uruguay Care Act, under which all children, persons with disabilities and elderly persons, have the right to get care, with the state not only providing care services but also guaranteeing their quality by providing training and regulations.
http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2017/2/feature-uruguay-care-law
The action by the French parliament to ban all production of oil and gas by 2040.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/20/france-bans-fracking-and-oil-extraction-in-all-of-its-territories
A wise, funny and compassionate open letter to Louis C.K. on sexual harassment by a NYC theater artist.
https://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2018/01/03/youre-my-sexist-dumbass-louis-c-k-and-heres-what-i-need-from-you-now/
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Saturday, January 20, 2018
#174 Stories
Dear all,
Well, here is a glimpse of our trip to Uganda. There may be no way to fully invite people in, but I’ve given it my best shot. And, after a not-so-easy transition and a too-quick pivot to holidays and holiday travel, I’m very glad to be home, without plans to go anywhere for a while.
I was pleased to be at the Philadelphia women’s march today with a sign that reads: “TAKE HEART — We are more POWERFUL than we know!” It got lots of attention and appreciation, and was a wonderful way to offer a little of my perspective to a lot of people.
I just saw the first tiniest sickle of moon this evening. There is something about that cycle that I love being part of.
Love,
Pamela
Stories
Home from two intense and rich weeks in Uganda, I wonder what is my story to tell about that time? We are often encouraged to support safety in groups by maintaining confidentiality, ensuring that nobody’s story leaves that space. Yet I’ve been helped by a friend’s reframing of that advice—to tell only your own story. You don’t just repeat another person’s story—which is basically gossip—but if it has changed you in some way, you may have something new of your own to share.
Somehow that advice seems relevant here. I am pulled to describe the poverty I saw, but telling the story of someone else’s poverty is a poor substitute for grieving that injustice, claiming my role in it, and acting to make a difference. The countless stories of resilience in the face of that poverty are not mine either, though the hope they bring me shapes my experience. So I’ll just mention that I love the creativity with which people name their businesses, and their readiness to include God in the mix. “God is Able Food Market” is a place I’d like to shop.
It could be argued that the story of the school that we have been supporting for decades is mine to tell. It has been reeling from the death of its beloved and charismatic founder, and we came with her son whom we’ve known for decades in Philadelphia. He has taken over the school’s leadership at his mother’s request, valiantly trying to solve thorny and systematic problems from a distance in the hours around his more-than-full-time regular job here.
But the details of family members’ complex relationship to the school, of the efforts to sort through multi-layered relationships and probe for solid ground on which to rebuild, are not really mine. I can say that I loved how hard and well we worked together. Day in and day out we met with members of the school community, listened hard, strategized together, prioritized tasks, followed up. We were in such good communication that it was like functioning as one larger organism, three hearts and minds working as one. I was inspired to suggest that, at the end of each day before dropping exhausted into bed, we take a few minutes to appreciate each other. This turned out to be a precious time together. And slowly, slowly, we saw the shape of a new and healthier culture beginning to emerge.
We were staying in the compound where many of Abitimo’s grandchildren still live. The complexities of their lives are not my story, but I can say that one evening after dinner, we hosted a family dance party out under the stars. There were probably twenty of us, ages 6 to 69, and we let loose together, moved our bodies, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
Of course we know that it is people, and our connections with each other, that make up our ultimate resource and wealth. And there are so many people there to respect. I loved how Abitimo’s driver has become a near and trusted friend, how, as we drove north from the airport the first day, we asked for his advice on approaching the school project, and then how we followed it. We left with many things undone, but there are also many very competent people there who can move the project forward.
When we weren’t working on the school project, we were leading two peer counseling workshops, one in our Northern Uganda home of Gulu, and the other in the capital in the south. After being with loved ones in the north, I wasn’t anxious to get to know a whole new group of people, but of course I fell in love. In our little support group, women told stories of incredible hardship growing up as girls, but we rejoiced together in our strength as women. Then, when the children showed up in the middle of the weekend, Chuck and I got to demonstrate the kind of active play that can get a whole group of little ones running and squealing with delight—opening up a whole new world of possibility for everyone there.
I organized a breakfast table where teachers told wonderful stories about how they are sharing their understanding of listening for healing at their schools. I had to remember that my role of gathering them together and encouraging them to share those stories more widely had its own value.
We thought hard about where outside money could help, and where it might just muddy the waters. The nursery teachers’ request for wall charts, however, was a straightforward one. Following a young driver we had just met, we ventured deep into the maze of Kampala, through a warren of tiny stationery shops, to find a business with four square feet of floor space and great rolls of charts, and emerged with fourteen for less than ten dollars! Then, at a craft market, we found balls made of banana leaves, and this young man got excited by the idea of making more himself, and has promised to send a photo of his first effort.
The last day and a half I had time to be with two of the young adults I’ve grown closest to in Uganda over the ten years we’ve been coming. Again, their stories are not mine, but my love is, and I try to remember that love can make a difference. My heart aches for the hands they’ve been dealt, I want more than anything to have things be right for them, and I know that’s beyond my powers. So I’m stuck loving in the midst of heartbreak—not assuming that I have solutions for anybody else, but not withholding—and maybe that’s exactly where I need to be, for their sake and for mine.
Tech match
I can bring the paper goods by bike—
plates in the basket
cups and plastic ware in the big blue pack.
Without a car, it’s awkward
but I’m glad to make it work.
The guys at the farm are busy
prepping for the festival.
Errand run, I turn to go,
much lighter now.
One young man with food
to carry home to cook
prepares to bike. No car for him.
And I can help!
My big blue pack is perfect for this task.
I pedal home in gratitude
that, car-less, my tech level was a match
for his.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Fair Food Program
In 2005, after the Coalition of Immokalee Workers boycotted Taco Bell for almost four years, the company agreed to sign a Fair Food Agreement, committing to pay a “penny more per pound” on its tomatoes, to be passed on as wage bonus to tomato harvesters, and to work with CIW to improve conditions in the fields. The CIW then targeted McDonald’s for two years; in 2007, McDonald's signed a Fair Food Agreement with CIW, and other fast-food chains and food retailers soon followed suit.
Despite the Florida Tomato Growers threat to fine farmers if they passed through "penny per pound" monies, two of the nation’s largest producers signed on to the program in 2010, effectively ending the industry boycott. The Fair Food Program has now expanded to tomato growers’ operations in Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey.
The Fair Food Program has six major components: a wage increase supported by the “penny per pound” price premium that participating buyers pay for their tomatoes; compliance with a code of conduct, including zero tolerance for forced labor, child labor and sexual assault; worker-to-worker education sessions; a worker-triggered complaint resolution mechanism, with potential suspension of a farm’s Participating Grower status; health and safety committees on every farm; specific changes in harvesting operations to improve workers’ wages and working conditions; and ongoing auditing of the farms by the Fair Food Standards Council to insure compliance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Food_Program
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
New York City is taking on the oil industry on two fronts, announcing a lawsuit against the top five oil companies for contributing to global warming and saying they will sell off billions in fossil fuel investments from the city's pension funds.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/01/10/us/ap-us-fossil-fuel-divestment.html
The city of Los Angeles has moved beyond legalizing marijuana to supporting those who were criminalized by drug laws in the past to have a role in new marijuana businesses.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/with-marijuana-now-legal-la-goes-further-to-make-amends-for-the-war-on-drugs-20180118
In a growing wave of sentiment against gerrymandering, an all-volunteer group of activists in Michigan has defied the odds by collecting hundreds of thousands of voter signatures for a 2018 initiative to overhaul redistricting.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/michigan/articles/2017-11-20/anti-gerrymandering-group-defies-odds-with-2018-ballot-drive
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has delivered a decision that offers a chance to fully empower the state Constitution’s long-suppressed Environmental Rights clause:
“The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”
http://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/guest-commentary-life-liberty-and-environmentalism/
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Well, here is a glimpse of our trip to Uganda. There may be no way to fully invite people in, but I’ve given it my best shot. And, after a not-so-easy transition and a too-quick pivot to holidays and holiday travel, I’m very glad to be home, without plans to go anywhere for a while.
I was pleased to be at the Philadelphia women’s march today with a sign that reads: “TAKE HEART — We are more POWERFUL than we know!” It got lots of attention and appreciation, and was a wonderful way to offer a little of my perspective to a lot of people.
I just saw the first tiniest sickle of moon this evening. There is something about that cycle that I love being part of.
Love,
Pamela
Stories
Home from two intense and rich weeks in Uganda, I wonder what is my story to tell about that time? We are often encouraged to support safety in groups by maintaining confidentiality, ensuring that nobody’s story leaves that space. Yet I’ve been helped by a friend’s reframing of that advice—to tell only your own story. You don’t just repeat another person’s story—which is basically gossip—but if it has changed you in some way, you may have something new of your own to share.
Somehow that advice seems relevant here. I am pulled to describe the poverty I saw, but telling the story of someone else’s poverty is a poor substitute for grieving that injustice, claiming my role in it, and acting to make a difference. The countless stories of resilience in the face of that poverty are not mine either, though the hope they bring me shapes my experience. So I’ll just mention that I love the creativity with which people name their businesses, and their readiness to include God in the mix. “God is Able Food Market” is a place I’d like to shop.
It could be argued that the story of the school that we have been supporting for decades is mine to tell. It has been reeling from the death of its beloved and charismatic founder, and we came with her son whom we’ve known for decades in Philadelphia. He has taken over the school’s leadership at his mother’s request, valiantly trying to solve thorny and systematic problems from a distance in the hours around his more-than-full-time regular job here.
But the details of family members’ complex relationship to the school, of the efforts to sort through multi-layered relationships and probe for solid ground on which to rebuild, are not really mine. I can say that I loved how hard and well we worked together. Day in and day out we met with members of the school community, listened hard, strategized together, prioritized tasks, followed up. We were in such good communication that it was like functioning as one larger organism, three hearts and minds working as one. I was inspired to suggest that, at the end of each day before dropping exhausted into bed, we take a few minutes to appreciate each other. This turned out to be a precious time together. And slowly, slowly, we saw the shape of a new and healthier culture beginning to emerge.
We were staying in the compound where many of Abitimo’s grandchildren still live. The complexities of their lives are not my story, but I can say that one evening after dinner, we hosted a family dance party out under the stars. There were probably twenty of us, ages 6 to 69, and we let loose together, moved our bodies, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
Of course we know that it is people, and our connections with each other, that make up our ultimate resource and wealth. And there are so many people there to respect. I loved how Abitimo’s driver has become a near and trusted friend, how, as we drove north from the airport the first day, we asked for his advice on approaching the school project, and then how we followed it. We left with many things undone, but there are also many very competent people there who can move the project forward.
When we weren’t working on the school project, we were leading two peer counseling workshops, one in our Northern Uganda home of Gulu, and the other in the capital in the south. After being with loved ones in the north, I wasn’t anxious to get to know a whole new group of people, but of course I fell in love. In our little support group, women told stories of incredible hardship growing up as girls, but we rejoiced together in our strength as women. Then, when the children showed up in the middle of the weekend, Chuck and I got to demonstrate the kind of active play that can get a whole group of little ones running and squealing with delight—opening up a whole new world of possibility for everyone there.
I organized a breakfast table where teachers told wonderful stories about how they are sharing their understanding of listening for healing at their schools. I had to remember that my role of gathering them together and encouraging them to share those stories more widely had its own value.
We thought hard about where outside money could help, and where it might just muddy the waters. The nursery teachers’ request for wall charts, however, was a straightforward one. Following a young driver we had just met, we ventured deep into the maze of Kampala, through a warren of tiny stationery shops, to find a business with four square feet of floor space and great rolls of charts, and emerged with fourteen for less than ten dollars! Then, at a craft market, we found balls made of banana leaves, and this young man got excited by the idea of making more himself, and has promised to send a photo of his first effort.
The last day and a half I had time to be with two of the young adults I’ve grown closest to in Uganda over the ten years we’ve been coming. Again, their stories are not mine, but my love is, and I try to remember that love can make a difference. My heart aches for the hands they’ve been dealt, I want more than anything to have things be right for them, and I know that’s beyond my powers. So I’m stuck loving in the midst of heartbreak—not assuming that I have solutions for anybody else, but not withholding—and maybe that’s exactly where I need to be, for their sake and for mine.
Tech match
I can bring the paper goods by bike—
plates in the basket
cups and plastic ware in the big blue pack.
Without a car, it’s awkward
but I’m glad to make it work.
The guys at the farm are busy
prepping for the festival.
Errand run, I turn to go,
much lighter now.
One young man with food
to carry home to cook
prepares to bike. No car for him.
And I can help!
My big blue pack is perfect for this task.
I pedal home in gratitude
that, car-less, my tech level was a match
for his.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Fair Food Program
In 2005, after the Coalition of Immokalee Workers boycotted Taco Bell for almost four years, the company agreed to sign a Fair Food Agreement, committing to pay a “penny more per pound” on its tomatoes, to be passed on as wage bonus to tomato harvesters, and to work with CIW to improve conditions in the fields. The CIW then targeted McDonald’s for two years; in 2007, McDonald's signed a Fair Food Agreement with CIW, and other fast-food chains and food retailers soon followed suit.
Despite the Florida Tomato Growers threat to fine farmers if they passed through "penny per pound" monies, two of the nation’s largest producers signed on to the program in 2010, effectively ending the industry boycott. The Fair Food Program has now expanded to tomato growers’ operations in Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland and New Jersey.
The Fair Food Program has six major components: a wage increase supported by the “penny per pound” price premium that participating buyers pay for their tomatoes; compliance with a code of conduct, including zero tolerance for forced labor, child labor and sexual assault; worker-to-worker education sessions; a worker-triggered complaint resolution mechanism, with potential suspension of a farm’s Participating Grower status; health and safety committees on every farm; specific changes in harvesting operations to improve workers’ wages and working conditions; and ongoing auditing of the farms by the Fair Food Standards Council to insure compliance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Food_Program
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
New York City is taking on the oil industry on two fronts, announcing a lawsuit against the top five oil companies for contributing to global warming and saying they will sell off billions in fossil fuel investments from the city's pension funds.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2018/01/10/us/ap-us-fossil-fuel-divestment.html
The city of Los Angeles has moved beyond legalizing marijuana to supporting those who were criminalized by drug laws in the past to have a role in new marijuana businesses.
http://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/with-marijuana-now-legal-la-goes-further-to-make-amends-for-the-war-on-drugs-20180118
In a growing wave of sentiment against gerrymandering, an all-volunteer group of activists in Michigan has defied the odds by collecting hundreds of thousands of voter signatures for a 2018 initiative to overhaul redistricting.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/michigan/articles/2017-11-20/anti-gerrymandering-group-defies-odds-with-2018-ballot-drive
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has delivered a decision that offers a chance to fully empower the state Constitution’s long-suppressed Environmental Rights clause:
“The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.”
http://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/guest-commentary-life-liberty-and-environmentalism/
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Saturday, December 23, 2017
#173 Heartening
Dear all,
We are back from a rich and intense two weeks in Northern Uganda, struggling a little to pivot into holiday season at home. There’s tons I could say about our trip, but it will keep. The message about heartening is the one I want to share this month.
For those of you who get a winter break, I hope it is nourishing. I take hope in the passing of the winter solstice and our hemisphere turning toward the light.
Love,
Pamela
Heartening
I work with Karen on a hot fall morning to save a witch hazel, growing in what used to be a rock pile in the community garden. It was planted too close to the paw-paw tree, and it’s dying, probably because its roots can’t deal with all that rock. Karen has taken over responsibility for this area, which was planted as a pollinator garden. But she is discouraged. It is overgrown, too closely planted, full of weeds. Part of me would choose to be elsewhere, but I’ve been absent from a string of garden work days. And there is the witch hazel, dying before our eyes. So we prune it way back, then work and work to dig the roots out of all that rock. After struggling and sweating for a long time, we succeed in getting it loose. We transplant it into a great pot filled with rich compost, and give it a good long drink. It’s got to be happier now, and Karen feels joined, ready to put renewed effort into this little spot in the garden that welcomes the butterflies.
This little episode gets me thinking. It’s so easy to lose heart. Yet it’s our heart, coeur in French, which gives us courage. Having Karen heartened, encouraged, matters. (And though the monarchs who have been gracing our garden with their presence may not engage in matters of the heart, being part of supporting their survival does seem like something that’s worth doing.) Other examples of heartening pile on each other in the weeks that follow
At Mill Creek Farm, we find the row where the beans and squash had earlier been now totally covered with weeds. And it is a long row—a discouraging prospect for an overworked farmer. I am glad to start the process—steadily uncovering a wide swath of rich earth. I don’t have time to do the whole row. But that start is heartening to our farmer. Now that the job is begun and the progress visible, the task of completing it feels more possible.
A group of child care workers want to highlight the critical economic importance of the work we do by closing down together for a day. We can’t get enough buy-in to all close, but I keep the idea alive, raising it at meetings, then setting up a call with a few advocates from across the state. The folks in Pittsburgh are heartened by that reminder of continued interest, and come up with a creative, potentially impactful and doable alternative to completely shutting down. That concept, in turn, heartens others.
One morning, my two-year-old grandson chooses to stick close to me while playing with little cars and animals. I find hand work to do that helps me stay present, offering ongoing warm and loving attention to his play. I have to believe that he is heartened by that attention, that the roots of his connection deepen, and his place in the world becomes a little more secure.
An older man recently joined our religious congregation. Single and handling significant health issues, he nevertheless maintains a positive attitude and perseveres in thoughtful work in the world. I make a point of greeting him, joining him, offering opportunities for him to be included and supported, thanking him for all he does. My intention is to give him heart.
I pick a bouquet of flowers for an activist who is facing grievous personal loss. I take time over cards for others, hoping that the note I write will add to their courage. And I listen, knowing how good attention can help drain discouragement.
There are so many things I don’t know. I don’t know if the witch hazel—or the monarchs—will survive. I don’t know if the time I spent transplanting it—or weeding that row at the farm, or hanging out with my grandson—could have been spent with greater impact elsewhere. I don’t know if discouragement will overtake people I’ve sought to encourage. But I have to believe that offering my attention and joining in the effort of another person in a way that heartens them—that gives them courage—is work worth doing.
Blanket
After a long balmy fall
cold swoops in
Overnight the gingkos
drop all their leaves.
In the morning
sidewalk and street
are covered
with a thick soft blanket
of green.
Imagine—A new economy is possible!
Municipal services
According to the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, cities and towns that want well-run water and sanitation services, low-cost access to the internet, and affordable housing should keep those operations public or run by local nonprofits. Research involving 1,600 cities in 45 countries that have chosen public ownership over corporate ownership, especially of their energy and water systems, shows that these (re)municipalizations “generally succeeded in bringing down costs and tariffs, improving conditions for workers and boosting service quality, while ensuring greater transparency and accountability.”
Both Hamburg, Germany, and Boulder, Colorado, for example, are making their electric power enterprises public in order to shift to green and renewable energy sources. In France, 106 cities and towns have taken over their local water systems in the past 15 years, in spite of the fact that France is home to some of the world’s largest private water companies. The movement for (re)municipalization is growing and spreading, despite the continued top-down push for privatization and austerity policies.
https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/reclaiming_public_services.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
Successful ballot initiatives in the state of Maine, that in 2016 boosted the state’s minimum wage, raised taxes on the wealthy to fund education, and introduced ranked-choice voting—and a plan for the 2018 ballot: universal home care for the elderly and disabled, paid for through taxes on the salaries and investment income of the state’s wealthiest residents. https://inequality.org/great-divide/taxing-wealthy-pay-universal-home-care/
New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s plans to divest state and city pension funds from coal, oil and gas companies. https://www.ecowatch.com/new-york-fossil-fuel-divestment-2518904580.html
A compelling and deeply human TEDx talk by an Israeli man, Ran Gavrieli, on "Why I stopped watching porn” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU.
Ecosystems and natural communities on eight acres of land on the island of Kaua’I now possess legal rights to exist, thrive, regenerate, and evolve, the first Rights of Nature conservation easement on the Hawaiian Islands. https://celdf.org/2017/12/press-release-first-rights-nature-easement-established-hawaii/
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
We are back from a rich and intense two weeks in Northern Uganda, struggling a little to pivot into holiday season at home. There’s tons I could say about our trip, but it will keep. The message about heartening is the one I want to share this month.
For those of you who get a winter break, I hope it is nourishing. I take hope in the passing of the winter solstice and our hemisphere turning toward the light.
Love,
Pamela
Heartening
I work with Karen on a hot fall morning to save a witch hazel, growing in what used to be a rock pile in the community garden. It was planted too close to the paw-paw tree, and it’s dying, probably because its roots can’t deal with all that rock. Karen has taken over responsibility for this area, which was planted as a pollinator garden. But she is discouraged. It is overgrown, too closely planted, full of weeds. Part of me would choose to be elsewhere, but I’ve been absent from a string of garden work days. And there is the witch hazel, dying before our eyes. So we prune it way back, then work and work to dig the roots out of all that rock. After struggling and sweating for a long time, we succeed in getting it loose. We transplant it into a great pot filled with rich compost, and give it a good long drink. It’s got to be happier now, and Karen feels joined, ready to put renewed effort into this little spot in the garden that welcomes the butterflies.
This little episode gets me thinking. It’s so easy to lose heart. Yet it’s our heart, coeur in French, which gives us courage. Having Karen heartened, encouraged, matters. (And though the monarchs who have been gracing our garden with their presence may not engage in matters of the heart, being part of supporting their survival does seem like something that’s worth doing.) Other examples of heartening pile on each other in the weeks that follow
At Mill Creek Farm, we find the row where the beans and squash had earlier been now totally covered with weeds. And it is a long row—a discouraging prospect for an overworked farmer. I am glad to start the process—steadily uncovering a wide swath of rich earth. I don’t have time to do the whole row. But that start is heartening to our farmer. Now that the job is begun and the progress visible, the task of completing it feels more possible.
A group of child care workers want to highlight the critical economic importance of the work we do by closing down together for a day. We can’t get enough buy-in to all close, but I keep the idea alive, raising it at meetings, then setting up a call with a few advocates from across the state. The folks in Pittsburgh are heartened by that reminder of continued interest, and come up with a creative, potentially impactful and doable alternative to completely shutting down. That concept, in turn, heartens others.
One morning, my two-year-old grandson chooses to stick close to me while playing with little cars and animals. I find hand work to do that helps me stay present, offering ongoing warm and loving attention to his play. I have to believe that he is heartened by that attention, that the roots of his connection deepen, and his place in the world becomes a little more secure.
An older man recently joined our religious congregation. Single and handling significant health issues, he nevertheless maintains a positive attitude and perseveres in thoughtful work in the world. I make a point of greeting him, joining him, offering opportunities for him to be included and supported, thanking him for all he does. My intention is to give him heart.
I pick a bouquet of flowers for an activist who is facing grievous personal loss. I take time over cards for others, hoping that the note I write will add to their courage. And I listen, knowing how good attention can help drain discouragement.
There are so many things I don’t know. I don’t know if the witch hazel—or the monarchs—will survive. I don’t know if the time I spent transplanting it—or weeding that row at the farm, or hanging out with my grandson—could have been spent with greater impact elsewhere. I don’t know if discouragement will overtake people I’ve sought to encourage. But I have to believe that offering my attention and joining in the effort of another person in a way that heartens them—that gives them courage—is work worth doing.
Blanket
After a long balmy fall
cold swoops in
Overnight the gingkos
drop all their leaves.
In the morning
sidewalk and street
are covered
with a thick soft blanket
of green.
Imagine—A new economy is possible!
Municipal services
According to the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute, cities and towns that want well-run water and sanitation services, low-cost access to the internet, and affordable housing should keep those operations public or run by local nonprofits. Research involving 1,600 cities in 45 countries that have chosen public ownership over corporate ownership, especially of their energy and water systems, shows that these (re)municipalizations “generally succeeded in bringing down costs and tariffs, improving conditions for workers and boosting service quality, while ensuring greater transparency and accountability.”
Both Hamburg, Germany, and Boulder, Colorado, for example, are making their electric power enterprises public in order to shift to green and renewable energy sources. In France, 106 cities and towns have taken over their local water systems in the past 15 years, in spite of the fact that France is home to some of the world’s largest private water companies. The movement for (re)municipalization is growing and spreading, despite the continued top-down push for privatization and austerity policies.
https://www.tni.org/files/publication-downloads/reclaiming_public_services.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
Successful ballot initiatives in the state of Maine, that in 2016 boosted the state’s minimum wage, raised taxes on the wealthy to fund education, and introduced ranked-choice voting—and a plan for the 2018 ballot: universal home care for the elderly and disabled, paid for through taxes on the salaries and investment income of the state’s wealthiest residents. https://inequality.org/great-divide/taxing-wealthy-pay-universal-home-care/
New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer’s plans to divest state and city pension funds from coal, oil and gas companies. https://www.ecowatch.com/new-york-fossil-fuel-divestment-2518904580.html
A compelling and deeply human TEDx talk by an Israeli man, Ran Gavrieli, on "Why I stopped watching porn” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU.
Ecosystems and natural communities on eight acres of land on the island of Kaua’I now possess legal rights to exist, thrive, regenerate, and evolve, the first Rights of Nature conservation easement on the Hawaiian Islands. https://celdf.org/2017/12/press-release-first-rights-nature-easement-established-hawaii/
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Sunday, November 5, 2017
#172 Free speech?
Dear all,
I continue to learn lessons around connection. We’re taught that independence is the highest good, yet I’m coming to see that ignoring the help that would be available if only we chose to access it is a blindness we can ill afford. In that spirit, I offer a resource and a request. Here’s a link to the text of the talk I gave on Money and Soul to a group of Quakers in New Mexico in June: https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged (It’s long, but I can’t put my hands on the abridged version...) And I continue to be heartened and inspired by all that is growing at the little urban farm I serve, but pretty concerned about our financial situation. If you would like to join in that effort, you can learn more at: https://www.youcaring.com/millcreekfarm-954583.
A friend reminded me on Thursday night to go out and take in the full moon—I’m thankful for both my friend and the moon.
Love,
Pamela
Free speech?
Heading to hearings at City Hall, I was disheartened. A right wing state senator and candidate for governor had teamed up with an opportunistic local colleague to support a challenge to a tax our city had passed a year ago that cut into the profits of big soda. The roster of speakers was overwhelmingly from Pepsi and Coke executives and the drivers and corner store owners they had mobilized.
I anticipated a long couple of hours listening to misrepresentation and one-sided testimony in the service of political ambition and corporate greed. Riding up in the elevator with two working class drivers, I was torn, both imagining how pleased they would be with the outcome, and wishing for an opportunity to talk together and look for common ground.
I was surprised to see the big hearing room already packed, and by the look of their signs and t-shirts, many of those present were supporters of this tax and all the city services it promised to support. A feisty City Council woman, who had applied to testify and been turned down, was holding forth in advance of the formal start. At least my perspective was getting a little airtime.
Then, as the hour arrived, a great noise started—chants and noise-makers and applause. Again surprised, I thought, well, this would equalize the sides a little, and make it easier to sit through the rest.
But it didn’t stop. When the noisemakers slowed down, the chants picked up, then the applause, and then the noisemakers again. I realized that the folks in this crowd weren’t just wanting to make sure their perspective was heard. They intended to keep the hearings from happening altogether!
My first reaction was straight out of my quiet, polite training: this wasn’t very nice. After all, everybody deserves to be heard, don’t they?
But as the noise continued, and the hearing didn’t start, there was plenty of time to reflect. Why was this out-of-town state senator challenging the legitimate democratic process of our city? His party holds power in the state and conveys a tone of open contempt for us and callous indifference to our needs.
They complain that we’re always looking for a handout. But now, when we’ve taken the initiative to find our own sources of revenue to fund preschool and parks and libraries and recreation centers, they want to come in and tell us we can’t?
Does everybody always have an equal right to speak? What about those who have easy access to power, those who are mouthpieces for big money, those who can buy elections and media outlets? Is it okay for them to orchestrate an event where they are in charge of who speaks and whose voice is not heard? What about those who have been disrespected and silenced? Should they be always required to listen without protest?
What about those who have overstepped, and are trespassing? Do they deserve our respectful attention? One of the chants was “This is our house!” And it’s true: we were in the room where the laws are made for our city, the room where we had struggled all last spring, amid intense controversy, to come up with a tax plan that Council could approve. These two men had not been invited, or even welcomed, by our City Council and Mayor.
The most moving moment for me came at the very end, long after the state senators had given up, packed their briefcases and left the room, when the noise had finally begun to die down, and that feisty little Councilwoman led a final chant: “Whose city?” “Our city!” “Whose city?” “Our city!” While the tactic of shouting down the opposition may never be mine, I do claim this city as mine, as ours, and that cry went straight to my heart.
Spider webs
The spook factor in spider webs is
near invisibility
You come upon them unawares
and then are caught
in sticky filament—
Made powerless by thinnest threads.
The wonder of the spider is her patience
in the weaving of that web
so deadly and so delicate.
The mass of stuff we stretch
on Hallowe-en
in strings and ropes and wads
cannot compare—
No patient craftsmanship
no fear, no awe—
an insult to the spider,
and creation as a whole.
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Municipal broadband
In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the United States to be wired by a municipality for 1 gigabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service. Five years later, the city began offering 10 gigabit-per-second service, which has attracted dozens of tech firms.
When the city’s municipal power company, EPB, set out in 2007 to modernize the city’s power grid, they realized they could lay every customer’s home for fiber-optic cable at the same time. Offering gigabit connections at $70 a month and providing discounts for low-income residents, EPB now serves about 82,000 people, more than half of the area’s Internet market. It’s been such a success that dozens of other towns and cities have begun their own municipal broadband networks, providing faster and cheaper service than private companies.
https://www.thenation.com/article/chattanooga-was-a-typical-post-industrial-city-then-it-began-offering-municipal-broadband/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
All the young climate change leaders across East Asia http://world.350.org/east-asia/camp2017/?akid=25525.1048214.HL1uDB&rd=1&t=7
Peruvian beauty pageant contestants substituting facts about violence against women for their “measurements” http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/peru-contestants-stand-violence-women-article-1.3604307
The vote by the Philadelphia Board of Pensions to divest from private prisons, since the civil rights and safety of people held in these facilities is in conflict with a profit motive. http://www.pionline.com/article/20171027/ONLINE/171029836/philadelphia-board-of-pensions-votes-to-divest-from-private-prisons
The decision by France’s largest listed bank, BNP Paribas SA, to no longer finance shale or oil sands projects, or oil or gas projects in the Arctic region. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bnp-paribas-to-stop-financing-shale-projects-2017-10-11
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
I continue to learn lessons around connection. We’re taught that independence is the highest good, yet I’m coming to see that ignoring the help that would be available if only we chose to access it is a blindness we can ill afford. In that spirit, I offer a resource and a request. Here’s a link to the text of the talk I gave on Money and Soul to a group of Quakers in New Mexico in June: https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged (It’s long, but I can’t put my hands on the abridged version...) And I continue to be heartened and inspired by all that is growing at the little urban farm I serve, but pretty concerned about our financial situation. If you would like to join in that effort, you can learn more at: https://www.youcaring.com/millcreekfarm-954583.
A friend reminded me on Thursday night to go out and take in the full moon—I’m thankful for both my friend and the moon.
Love,
Pamela
Free speech?
Heading to hearings at City Hall, I was disheartened. A right wing state senator and candidate for governor had teamed up with an opportunistic local colleague to support a challenge to a tax our city had passed a year ago that cut into the profits of big soda. The roster of speakers was overwhelmingly from Pepsi and Coke executives and the drivers and corner store owners they had mobilized.
I anticipated a long couple of hours listening to misrepresentation and one-sided testimony in the service of political ambition and corporate greed. Riding up in the elevator with two working class drivers, I was torn, both imagining how pleased they would be with the outcome, and wishing for an opportunity to talk together and look for common ground.
I was surprised to see the big hearing room already packed, and by the look of their signs and t-shirts, many of those present were supporters of this tax and all the city services it promised to support. A feisty City Council woman, who had applied to testify and been turned down, was holding forth in advance of the formal start. At least my perspective was getting a little airtime.
Then, as the hour arrived, a great noise started—chants and noise-makers and applause. Again surprised, I thought, well, this would equalize the sides a little, and make it easier to sit through the rest.
But it didn’t stop. When the noisemakers slowed down, the chants picked up, then the applause, and then the noisemakers again. I realized that the folks in this crowd weren’t just wanting to make sure their perspective was heard. They intended to keep the hearings from happening altogether!
My first reaction was straight out of my quiet, polite training: this wasn’t very nice. After all, everybody deserves to be heard, don’t they?
But as the noise continued, and the hearing didn’t start, there was plenty of time to reflect. Why was this out-of-town state senator challenging the legitimate democratic process of our city? His party holds power in the state and conveys a tone of open contempt for us and callous indifference to our needs.
They complain that we’re always looking for a handout. But now, when we’ve taken the initiative to find our own sources of revenue to fund preschool and parks and libraries and recreation centers, they want to come in and tell us we can’t?
Does everybody always have an equal right to speak? What about those who have easy access to power, those who are mouthpieces for big money, those who can buy elections and media outlets? Is it okay for them to orchestrate an event where they are in charge of who speaks and whose voice is not heard? What about those who have been disrespected and silenced? Should they be always required to listen without protest?
What about those who have overstepped, and are trespassing? Do they deserve our respectful attention? One of the chants was “This is our house!” And it’s true: we were in the room where the laws are made for our city, the room where we had struggled all last spring, amid intense controversy, to come up with a tax plan that Council could approve. These two men had not been invited, or even welcomed, by our City Council and Mayor.
The most moving moment for me came at the very end, long after the state senators had given up, packed their briefcases and left the room, when the noise had finally begun to die down, and that feisty little Councilwoman led a final chant: “Whose city?” “Our city!” “Whose city?” “Our city!” While the tactic of shouting down the opposition may never be mine, I do claim this city as mine, as ours, and that cry went straight to my heart.
Spider webs
The spook factor in spider webs is
near invisibility
You come upon them unawares
and then are caught
in sticky filament—
Made powerless by thinnest threads.
The wonder of the spider is her patience
in the weaving of that web
so deadly and so delicate.
The mass of stuff we stretch
on Hallowe-en
in strings and ropes and wads
cannot compare—
No patient craftsmanship
no fear, no awe—
an insult to the spider,
and creation as a whole.
Imagine: A New Economy is Possible!
Municipal broadband
In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the United States to be wired by a municipality for 1 gigabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service. Five years later, the city began offering 10 gigabit-per-second service, which has attracted dozens of tech firms.
When the city’s municipal power company, EPB, set out in 2007 to modernize the city’s power grid, they realized they could lay every customer’s home for fiber-optic cable at the same time. Offering gigabit connections at $70 a month and providing discounts for low-income residents, EPB now serves about 82,000 people, more than half of the area’s Internet market. It’s been such a success that dozens of other towns and cities have begun their own municipal broadband networks, providing faster and cheaper service than private companies.
https://www.thenation.com/article/chattanooga-was-a-typical-post-industrial-city-then-it-began-offering-municipal-broadband/
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
All the young climate change leaders across East Asia http://world.350.org/east-asia/camp2017/?akid=25525.1048214.HL1uDB&rd=1&t=7
Peruvian beauty pageant contestants substituting facts about violence against women for their “measurements” http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/peru-contestants-stand-violence-women-article-1.3604307
The vote by the Philadelphia Board of Pensions to divest from private prisons, since the civil rights and safety of people held in these facilities is in conflict with a profit motive. http://www.pionline.com/article/20171027/ONLINE/171029836/philadelphia-board-of-pensions-votes-to-divest-from-private-prisons
The decision by France’s largest listed bank, BNP Paribas SA, to no longer finance shale or oil sands projects, or oil or gas projects in the Arctic region. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/bnp-paribas-to-stop-financing-shale-projects-2017-10-11
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
#171 Blessings
Dear all,
It’s been wonderful to have some weekends this month at home and to feel more caught up with my life. I continue to puzzle over the question of how to fully enjoy the goodness of small and close-in things, while not turning away from all the big hard things that surround us? I think the two are somehow connected, more intimately than we realize. So I wish you the joy of small things as well as courage for the big ones.
Love,
Pamela
Blessings
When our oldest son asked if we could take in a friend of his, it wasn’t hard to say yes. Joel was from the South, separated from his family for some reason, and needing a place to land. We had a room. He was thoughtful, warm, hard-working, ready to please, and we just folded him into our household. It wasn’t long before he had been folded into our hearts as well.
I remember one time when he helped with a big physical job I had to complete. I said, “Thank you, Joel. You saved my life.” He said, “Well, you saved mine.” I was surprised. I hadn’t thought of that before, but considered the possibility that it might be true.
As the years went by we got to know each other better. He practiced peer listening with us and became more open to talking about his personal life and feelings, though we never heard the full story of why he left home. He went through the job and relationship ups and downs that you expect in young adult years. After a while, he got a steady job and met a nice young woman; the pieces of his life seemed to be falling into place.
So when he started talking about going home to Birmingham, we were taken aback. We loved him and wanted him to stay. But he was ready to reconcile with his family and finish the degree he had started down there. How could we not support him in those goals?
He stayed in touch, came up and visited during the holidays. Sarah moved down to Alabama to be with him. When we got the invitation to his wedding, we knew we would go. This might be our final act of surrogate parenting, seeing him finally established in a life of his own.
When we called to check in about hotel arrangements and were invited by Joel to join the family for the rehearsal dinner, we started to realize that this wasn’t just another wedding. A storm and rerouted flight kept us from the dinner, but the warmth with which we were welcomed at the wedding was astonishing. His mother was the first in a series of relatives to greet us, and we were thanked, again and again, for taking care of Joel. His stepfather, his aunts and uncles, his godfather, the mothers of his high school buddies all were warm in their appreciation of what we had done for their boy, for their family.
We were invited to come back and visit, and could tell they meant it. His great aunt from Mississippi said with great energy that “NOBODY would treat us better than they would” and I believe she was telling the truth. It had seemed such a simple and ordinary thing to welcome Joel with an open heart. But now that we were receiving an equally open-hearted welcome from his family, it seemed precious, amazing, even miraculous.
The blessings seem endless. We were blessed to know Joel, then to receive back in kind from his family what we gave to him, learning to better value both the giving and the receiving. We were blessed to be welcomed to the South by people who have felt the weight of oppression but have not been kept down. We were blessed, after going down to Birmingham to honor one young man, to return with a whole new extended family in Alabama and Mississippi, blessed with another place to call home.
Anchored
Arriving alone in the big city
at nightfall
public transit to master
everything strange
no reference point
no anchor
And then
above towering cranes
that glowing crescent
known and loved--
my hometown moon.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Solidarity economy production chain
Justa Trama, in Brazil, is the largest production chain of solidarity economy producers. Farmer associations grow organic cotton to sell to workers cooperatives that make threads and textiles. The worker cooperatives sell the threads and textiles to urban cooperatives that produce and sell clothes, dolls, and educational games with these inputs. Justa Trama comprises more than 600 workers in solidarity economy enterprises in five states in Brazil.
https://blogecosol.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/marc3adlia_justa_trama.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The Scottish government has banned fracking after a consultation found overwhelming public opposition and little economic justification for the industry. The Scottish energy minister said that allowing fracking would undermine the government’s ambitions to deeply cut Scotland’s climate emissions, and would lead to unjustifiable environmental damage.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/03/scottish-government-bans-fracking-scotland-paul-wheelhouse
The state of New Jersey is replacing cash bail, which penalizes the poor, with a system of judging risk that lets many who are accused of low level crimes no longer languish in jail for months awaiting trial.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/30/new-jersey-bail-reform-criminal-justice-bond-money?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Sweden has the world’s first self-defined feminist foreign policy, which means that all of Sweden’s decision-making – from aid allocation to diplomacy – is informed by its vision for women’s empowerment. The approach is grounded in a wealth of research showing that the more equal a country is, the less likely it is to endure war, food insecurity or political and extremist violence.
https://apolitical.co/sweden-flies-flag-feminist-foreign-policy/
After the Canadian National Energy Board told TransCanada that their Energy East Project's environmental reviews would look at the total life cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with the project--extracting, processing, transporting, refining, and burning fossil fuels--TransCanada scrapped plans to build a pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the east coast of Canada.
https://thinkprogress.org/transcanada-scraps-energy-east-9d45aa211463/
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
It’s been wonderful to have some weekends this month at home and to feel more caught up with my life. I continue to puzzle over the question of how to fully enjoy the goodness of small and close-in things, while not turning away from all the big hard things that surround us? I think the two are somehow connected, more intimately than we realize. So I wish you the joy of small things as well as courage for the big ones.
Love,
Pamela
Blessings
When our oldest son asked if we could take in a friend of his, it wasn’t hard to say yes. Joel was from the South, separated from his family for some reason, and needing a place to land. We had a room. He was thoughtful, warm, hard-working, ready to please, and we just folded him into our household. It wasn’t long before he had been folded into our hearts as well.
I remember one time when he helped with a big physical job I had to complete. I said, “Thank you, Joel. You saved my life.” He said, “Well, you saved mine.” I was surprised. I hadn’t thought of that before, but considered the possibility that it might be true.
As the years went by we got to know each other better. He practiced peer listening with us and became more open to talking about his personal life and feelings, though we never heard the full story of why he left home. He went through the job and relationship ups and downs that you expect in young adult years. After a while, he got a steady job and met a nice young woman; the pieces of his life seemed to be falling into place.
So when he started talking about going home to Birmingham, we were taken aback. We loved him and wanted him to stay. But he was ready to reconcile with his family and finish the degree he had started down there. How could we not support him in those goals?
He stayed in touch, came up and visited during the holidays. Sarah moved down to Alabama to be with him. When we got the invitation to his wedding, we knew we would go. This might be our final act of surrogate parenting, seeing him finally established in a life of his own.
When we called to check in about hotel arrangements and were invited by Joel to join the family for the rehearsal dinner, we started to realize that this wasn’t just another wedding. A storm and rerouted flight kept us from the dinner, but the warmth with which we were welcomed at the wedding was astonishing. His mother was the first in a series of relatives to greet us, and we were thanked, again and again, for taking care of Joel. His stepfather, his aunts and uncles, his godfather, the mothers of his high school buddies all were warm in their appreciation of what we had done for their boy, for their family.
We were invited to come back and visit, and could tell they meant it. His great aunt from Mississippi said with great energy that “NOBODY would treat us better than they would” and I believe she was telling the truth. It had seemed such a simple and ordinary thing to welcome Joel with an open heart. But now that we were receiving an equally open-hearted welcome from his family, it seemed precious, amazing, even miraculous.
The blessings seem endless. We were blessed to know Joel, then to receive back in kind from his family what we gave to him, learning to better value both the giving and the receiving. We were blessed to be welcomed to the South by people who have felt the weight of oppression but have not been kept down. We were blessed, after going down to Birmingham to honor one young man, to return with a whole new extended family in Alabama and Mississippi, blessed with another place to call home.
Anchored
Arriving alone in the big city
at nightfall
public transit to master
everything strange
no reference point
no anchor
And then
above towering cranes
that glowing crescent
known and loved--
my hometown moon.
Imagine: A new economy is possible!
Solidarity economy production chain
Justa Trama, in Brazil, is the largest production chain of solidarity economy producers. Farmer associations grow organic cotton to sell to workers cooperatives that make threads and textiles. The worker cooperatives sell the threads and textiles to urban cooperatives that produce and sell clothes, dolls, and educational games with these inputs. Justa Trama comprises more than 600 workers in solidarity economy enterprises in five states in Brazil.
https://blogecosol.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/marc3adlia_justa_trama.pdf
Some things that have made me hopeful recently
The Scottish government has banned fracking after a consultation found overwhelming public opposition and little economic justification for the industry. The Scottish energy minister said that allowing fracking would undermine the government’s ambitions to deeply cut Scotland’s climate emissions, and would lead to unjustifiable environmental damage.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/03/scottish-government-bans-fracking-scotland-paul-wheelhouse
The state of New Jersey is replacing cash bail, which penalizes the poor, with a system of judging risk that lets many who are accused of low level crimes no longer languish in jail for months awaiting trial.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/30/new-jersey-bail-reform-criminal-justice-bond-money?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Sweden has the world’s first self-defined feminist foreign policy, which means that all of Sweden’s decision-making – from aid allocation to diplomacy – is informed by its vision for women’s empowerment. The approach is grounded in a wealth of research showing that the more equal a country is, the less likely it is to endure war, food insecurity or political and extremist violence.
https://apolitical.co/sweden-flies-flag-feminist-foreign-policy/
After the Canadian National Energy Board told TransCanada that their Energy East Project's environmental reviews would look at the total life cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with the project--extracting, processing, transporting, refining, and burning fossil fuels--TransCanada scrapped plans to build a pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to the east coast of Canada.
https://thinkprogress.org/transcanada-scraps-energy-east-9d45aa211463/
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
Recent 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)
faitheconomyecology.wordpress.com, a website that I've contributed to often (check the archives)
www.ourchildrenourselves.com, a home for all the parenting writing I've done over the past 20 years. NOTE THE NEW URL.
Pamela Haines
215-349-9428
To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.
www.pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
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