A movement with legs: understanding the Occupy movement

The movement of many voices, also known as Occupy Wall Street, has just as many commentators—bloggers, bankers and barbers alike. Still, few seem to know what it's really about. Let’s begin with some recent history in an attempt to understand what gave rise to this movement and what it hopes to accomplish.

Occupy’s inspiration comes largely from the protests in Cairo beginning on January 25, 2011, and the more recent Spanish “Acampada” (camp-in). Egypt’s revolution was excited by the Tunisian uprising that started in December 2010 against the corrupted regime of former president Ben Ali, who had ruled for over two decades. On January 25, Egyptians took to Cairo’s central Tahrir Square to demonstrate against Hosni Mubarak, who had been in power for almost thirty years. In Madrid, what began on Sunday, May 15 as a march in protest of Europe’s highest unemployment rate of 21% turned into a camp-in at a square in the middle of the city.

Occupy Wall Street officially began in British Columbia, Canada, with a blog posted on July 13 by Adbusters, a network of self-proclaimed “culture jammers and creatives.” The post begins, “#OCCUPYWALLSTREET: Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? On September 17, flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades, and occupy Wall Street.” And that is just what an estimated 5000 people did, amassed with help from a group called “US Day of Rage” which calls for free and fair elections, as well as the “hacktivist” network known as “Anonymous.”

Farm camp snapshot: story time in the sheepfold.

 

Food, Glorious Food! Applying Our Values to Our Veggies

(Adapted from the Principia Pilot.)
The people I admire most are those who truly embody their values, and I strive to do the same. Some of my most basic and essential values stipulate the health and happiness of all humans and the natural treatment of animals and Earth. Why then, have I been eating food that denies those very things? Well, I’ve decided to stop.

“Modern eating is all about forgetting,” Harvey Ussery, a self-proclaimed modern homesteader, said. Perhaps more than forgetting, it’s about ignoring. It’s not necessarily our fault that most people don’t know much about where food comes from or how to grow it, which they could hardly help but know in times past.

But once we know even the first thing about food production, how can we consume meat and vegetables that rely on antibiotics and other chemicals to make it to our lunch lines—chemicals, those are, that sicken livestock, poison field workers, and pollute our waterways?

On Healing the World

(Originally posted on euphratesinstitute.org/warriors-for-peace/)

As the sun began to set today, the wind whistled through the greening trees, the birds sang their songs of spring, and twenty or more students gathered to pray and to heal. I arrived at this impromptu outdoor church service just as the prepared readings were ending. The topic was healing, and what followed were the voices of almost everyone there, sharing gratitude, inspiration, and accounts of healing. Most people who shared expressed their gratitude for this meeting and the irrepressible sense of love and healing power in the air. I felt it too, this overwhelming sense of infinite goodness. And I know that it reaches beyond that one beautiful spot where we were sitting.

It is that same spirit of infinite possibility that is present for all the universe, and I know it’s what can heal the world. It is the wealth of ideas that anyone, anywhere, can access at anytime.

From Scriptures to Scruples

(Adapted in-class essay from my Women in the Bible course)
       I consider myself Christian because I hope, as a spiritual freedom fighter, to follow Jesus’ example in healing the world. But I have mixed feelings about including the Bible in my personal practice of faith--even a spiritual interpretation of it--because of the rampant chauvinism portrayed in it and perpetuated by its societies. That said, I find it useless to read the Bible selectively, as some feminist Christians have. I do find valuable lessons and principles in the scriptures, and those I strive to embody, but the sexism is there, and instead of being ignored or omitted, it should be considered as we solve the same issues engrained in society today. While we look to parts of the Bible for inspiration and guidance, we should look to other parts in our self-examination, as we work out our own principles and give the long-overdue justice to those marginalized groups that have endured our selfishness and prejudice since, it seems, the beginning of human history.

torn away

I'm watching a stupid movie on this Boeing 757 and reading the words on the T-shirts walking the aisle and it hits me, tears and all. I'm going back to the U.S. It's hitting me square in the face but I just can't believe it. How did this happen? Where did these months go? They've gone to my memories, deep down and all over the surface. Please don't let them sink anymore. And why do I cry? Because for all my excitement, I wish it weren't ending. Because I'm flying over ripples of blue, away from those twelve wonderful beings who have so filled my life in this time with things I can hardly comprehend, who have fed my growth with every insight and embrace. Away from them with all they've given me, toward a world of unknown challenges and possibilities. This growth that magnifies and shapes me brings me to big drops on the page, salty and sentimental. The surface of the sea below us reminds me of a wrinkled passion-fruit, all flattened out. My passion remains alive and full, but it might take my soul a good while to catch up this time.

River
rush over me
and heal my wounds.
A friend of ours
had a fight with my skin last week,
and I suffer from it still
but it has taught me to breathe.
And so I breathe.
Water and wind,
sun and sound
fill me,
take me over.
River
rush over me,
heal these wounds.