documentary tomorrow, Sunday Forums; abuse or empowerment?
Dave
http://allsoulskc.org/events/tuesday-night-film/
May 15 “Freedom Seekers: Stories from the Western Underground Railroad” 2011 * 75 minutes
Gary Jenkins’ latest documentary about the western branch of the Underground Railroad that helped slaves escape from the KC area to freedom.
http://allsoulskc.org/category/sunday-forum/ KC’s longest running conversation, since ‘43. Reruns available on KKFI.
“Keeping Food out of the Landfill” with Steve Fishman
May 20 Forum, 10 a.m.
Steve is a waste management specialist in the Air and Waste Management Division of EPA Region 7 in KCK. He will describe an interesting new program they are working on to salvage food that normally goes to a landfill. US EPA has initiated a Food Recovery Challenge. They are recruiting partners to minimize loss, increase donations, and find ways to recover the energy in organics.
“The Political Season” with Linwood Tauheed
May 27 Forum, 10 a.m.
The “political season” encompasses upcoming and crucial elections, the determination of a community to make changing Kansas City schools educate, and the aspiration to compel community economic development. Dr. Linwood Tauheed, assistant professor of economics at UMKC, brings economics to urban education and community building.
Thank you for the almost standing room only for the Koch Bros documentary on 5-1.
Please also consider how you can add your voice (like joining or inviting others to become part of and strengthen online and in-person communities).
Watching a documentary and having disdain/sadness from the information revealed can be a form of self-abuse.
Flipside is that not watching, not educating yourself, and numbing to action can be an even more profound form of self-abuse.
Informing yourself AND patiently organizing to stand with your fellow citizenry for the long haul, that’s personal empowerment.
Best wishes to you and yours.
Consider the article Ben emailed earlier today.
http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/83-83/11425-focus-colonized-by-corporations
…object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask… …hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theater…
--I somewhat disagree with the article; it’s not either DC or Wall St as the problem. It’s both. As some of the comments following the article suggest, you can’t vote out Wall St., but you can vote out the politicians that are willing servants of K Street and Wall St.
We just recently visited Hoover’s Museum and Library (it’s just east of Iowa City). I overheard six different visitors commenting about the exhibits and the parallels to today. Hoover (Sec of Commerce, at the time) warned President Coolidge in writing about what Wall St. was doing. Unfortunately for him and the nation, Pres. Hoover just 8 months into his presidency had to face the reality of his warnings when the Great Depression fully revealed itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Hoover
A few days prior to visiting Hoover’s Museum, my wife and I had the privilege of hearing Cornell West speak at U of Chicago (20 minute pre-session, two main speakers, followed by Q&A). I always found him engaging to hear/read in segments I caught on shows or interviews, but hearing him speak 45 min uninterrupted… it would be an understatement to say that he has fire.
Several things from Cornell West that may interest you:
-It’s not about Obama or politicians. I didn’t think Obama would be so tied to the oligarchs. Almost all politicians have been bought and paid for. It’s about revolution, that begins with the citizens.
-I disagree with my brother (referring to the first speaker), but he will never sell out to the highest bidder.
-All forms of tyranny scare people from straightening their backs.
-iron hand of capitalism vs. the penal fist of incarceration (like prison industrial complex becoming one of America’s biggest businesses àwhy soften immigration laws when prison corps and prison lobbyists can make more money by needing to build more prisons to try to feed/house people while they’re awaiting trials/deportation/investigation/enforcement…?)
-1% that own 42%. Top 1 % equivalent to bottom 115 million of USA.
-Too many of our leaders are bought. They’ve sold out.
-We need a fundamental commitment to non-market values, like refusal to be well-adjusted to injustice.
-What will next generation look like if you don’t tell the full fledged truth?
-Financial corporations producing little value, like casinos, while education and housing and jobs are eroding.
-Congress is legalizing corruption, with 13,000 lobbyists and 100,000 non-registered lobbyists.
[note: with over 500 lobbyists per elected official and their bottomless pit budgets to “access” your elected officials, how much is your voice really worth to them?]
-What common good can you have when the tilt is so corrupt?
-Who talks about dignity of poor people? Other than the politicians during a campaign and after election day going back to business as usual.
-…prison, military, Wall St., and industrial complex plus the multi-media megaplex (weapons of mass distraction)
-Louis Armstrong, W. E. Dubois… artists are fundamental in the health of a society. They are the ones who spoke.
-Jesus said, “What you do to the least among you, you do to me.”
-There was a time when our religious institutions had prophetic fervor.
-Bush had 44 drones. Obama has 250 or so drones.
-The difference between music of today and music of the past is that the past would stimulate social consciousness.
-There’s no public dialogue. We need forums.
-Show me a society that can’t civicate, and you’ll see a society that can’t reproduce itself.
-We need to let our young folks know we care.
Post Forum dialogue:
The first main speaker was Carl Dix, a founding member of the Revolutionary Communist Party.
Cornell spoke about how we needed to work together, even though he profoundly disagreed with some of his long time friend’s beliefs. Nonetheless, he knew Dix was not bought and paid for, and there were elements where they needed one another.
Since I had the privilege of escaping the ridiculousness of communism in Romania, and from having couple days prior (to Cornell West’s U of C Forum) gone to the nearby Oriental Museum (U of C’s impressive collection of relics from the ages of empires going back to Sargon the Great), it occurred to me to ask Mr. Dix if he knew of a single communist civilization in the history of our world that was successful or didn’t otherwise abuse its citizens.
Another event attendee commented, “Do you know of any other government system that abuses its citizens? One maybe much closer to home? He added that if the radical left was more welcomed the way Tea Party and radical right have tipped the teeter-tooter so far to the right, maybe the Dems wouldn’t have so cowardly and quickly caved on healthcare reform and on the recent poison pill of the SuperCommittee
(that as Jon Stewart recently points out to have been merely Repubs saying that they in fact won’t budge at all on defense. “We” will all have to make the reductions only on social spending. We won’t take the poison pill together as agreed; you Dems take the pill by yourselves. >>Would be funny, if it weren’t so sad. Note also that Dems have just as much military-prison-industrial complex in their back yards as repubs do.)
Made me think.
Though I’ll never condone the Pollyanna idealism of American communists that have never tasted the generations of abuse that communism inflicts, is any form of abuse really better than any other? Corporation abuse was discussed/warned by Thomas Jefferson and several of his fellow Founding Fathers, Sec of Commerce Hoover warned President Coolidge, Occupy and Reclaim Democracy warn much the same thing…
What’s the answer?
Don’t know, other than we’re in it together
(unless we permit ourselves to be part of the masses being lulled,
get impatient with activism,
remain/go quiet on demanding radical campaign finance reform,
stop voting,
don’t give hours/dollars to our fellow teammates,
get bogged down in big/little squabbles with teammates,
don’t heed Cornell West’s warnings about the industrial complex and the weapons of mass distraction of the multi-media megaplex…).