Category: Culture
Waiting for Gandhi
On Sunday evenings I catch up on my New York Times OP/Ed page. Nicholas Kristof has been traveling in Israel and the West Bank for a couple of weeks. His column this week notes that his family is traveling with him. His kids had the experience of being tear gassed by IDF troops and had stones thrown at them by Palestinian youth. Here are a few paragraphs of his post from July 9, 2010.
Waiting for Gandhi
Nicholas Kristof | The New York Times | July 9, 2010Despite being stoned and tear-gassed on this trip, I find a reed of hope here. It’s that some Palestinians are dabbling in a strategy of nonviolent resistance that just might be a game-changer.
The organizers hail the methods of Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., recognizing that nonviolent resistance could be a more powerful tool to achieve a Palestinian state than rockets and missiles. Bilin is one of several West Bank villages experimenting with these methods, so I followed protesters here as they marched to the Israeli security fence.
Israeli security forces knew how to deal with bombers but were flummoxed by peaceful Palestinian women. Even when beaten and fired on with rubber bullets, the women persevered. Finally, Israel gave up. It rerouted the security fence to bypass nearly all of Budrus.
Brian McLaren’s Response to the President’s Remarks
Brian McLaren’s blog posts and books give casual readers (like myself) a sense that he is evolving: religiously, theologically, politically, and as a person. It is a good thing. I wonder how many of the “emergent” followers and second generation leaders would consider McLaren emergent today? That is another subject for another day. Here are a few paragraphs of his initial response to President Obama’s oval office chat (that I have not watch in its entirety yet) as McLaren posted to God’s Politics on Sojourners. Click the title to read his entire post.
My Initial Response to President Obama’s Speech
Brian McLaren | 6/16/2010 | God’s PoliticsI was glad the president emphasized the need to break our addiction to oil in his speech last night, and I thought he did a good job of demonstrating commitment to the people of the Gulf region. But if President Obama doesn’t specify the way forward by offering a legislative path, who will? Congress? Politicians whose re-election campaigns are heavily subsidized by the fossil fuel industries and who depend on voting blocs mis-educated by corporate media?
I hope that last night was simply the opening volley in what will be a focused, determined, well-planned, energetic agenda to make a new clean and sustainable economy the legacy not only of the president, but of the government, and not only of the government, but of our generation as a whole.
If political, economic, social, and faith community leaders start articulating a bold vision for a new economy and start demonstrating determined leadership in achieving it, I think they’ll find growing numbers of us are fired up and ready to go.