12 Things White People Can Do Now Because of Ferguson

  News & Politics  

 

Janeewoods.com / By Janee Woods

12 Things White People Can Do Now Because of Ferguson

 

In the wake of Michael Brown's murder, there's been silence from the majority of my nonactivist, nonacademic white friends.

August 18, 2014  |  

 

 

This article first appeared on What Matters with Janee Woods.

As we all know by now, Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was gunned down by the police while walking to his grandmother’s house in the middle of the afternoon. For the past few days my Facebook newsfeed has been full of stories about the incidents unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri.

But then I realized something.

For the first couple of days, almost all of the status updates expressing anger and grief about yet another extrajudicial killing of an unarmed black boy, the news articles about the militarized police altercations with community members and the horrifying pictures of his dead body on the city concrete were posted by people of color. Outpourings of rage and demands for justice were voiced by black people, Latinos, Asian Americans, Arab American Muslims. But posts by white people were few at first and those that I saw were posted mostly by my white activist or academic friends who are committed to putting themselves on the frontlines of any conversation about racial or economic injustice in America.

And almost nothing, silence practically, from the majority of my nonactivist, nonacademic white friends—those same people who gleefully jumped on the bandwagon to dump buckets of ice over their heads to raise money for ALS and who wrote heartfelt messages about reaching out to loved ones suffering from depression following the suicide of Robin Williams, may he rest in peace. But an unarmed black teenager walking down the street in broad daylight gets harassed and murdered by a white police officer and those same people seem to have nothing urgent to say about pervasive, systemic, deadly racism in America?
Why? The simplest explanation is because Facebook is, well, Facebook. It’s not the New York Times or a town hall meeting or the current events class at your high school. It’s the internet playground for sharing cat videos, cheeky status updates about the joys and tribulations of living with toddlers, and humble bragging about your fabulous European vacation. Some people don’t think Facebook is the forum for serious conversations. Okay, that’s fine if you fall into that category and your wall is nothing but rainbows and happy talk about how much you love your life.

However, I think the explanation is more complex and mirrors the silence of many people that I witness in real life. A lot of white people aren’t speaking out publicly against the killing of Michael Brown because they don’t see a space for themselves to engage meaningfully in the conversation so that they can move to action against racism. It’s not so much that they have nothing to say but rather they don’t see an opportunity being opened up for them to say something or to do something that matters. Or they might not be sure what to say or how to do it. They might have a hard time seeing a role for themselves in the fight against racism because they aren’t racist, they don’t feel that racism affects them or their loved ones personally, they worry that talking about race and differences between cultures might make things worse, or they think they rarely see overt racism at play in their everyday lives. And, sometimes, they are afraid. There’s a real fear of saying the wrong thing even if the intention is pure, of being alienated socially and economically from other white people for standing in solidarity with black people, or of putting one’s self in harm’s way, whether the harm be physical or psychological.  I’m not saying those aren’t valid fears but I am challenging white people to consider carefully whether failing to speak out or act because of those fears is justified when white silence and inaction mean the oppression and death of black people.

Let’s talk about an active role for white people in the fight against racism because racism burdens all of us and is destroying our communities. And, quite frankly, because white people have a role in undoing racism because white people created and, for the most part, currently maintain (whether they want to or not) the racist system that benefits white people to the detriment of people of color. My white friends who’ve spoken out harshly against the murder of Michael Brown end with a similar refrain: What can I do that will matter in the fight against racism?

White people who are sick and tired of racism should work hard to become white allies.

In the aftermath of the murder of Michael Brown, may he rest in power, here are some ways for white people to become white allies who are engaged thoughtfully and critically in examining the situation in Ferguson and standing on the side of justice and equity. This list is a good place to start your fight to dismantle racial inequity and shine a light on the oppressive structures that lead to yet another extrajudicial killing of a black person.

1. Learn about the racialized history of Ferguson and how it reflects the racialized history of America.  

Michael Brown’s murder is not a social anomaly or statistical outlier. It is the direct product of deadly tensions born from decades of housing discrimination, white flight, intergenerational poverty and racial profiling. The militarized police response to peaceful assembly by the people mirrors what happened in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement.

2. Reject the “He Was a Good Kid” narrative and lift up the “Black Lives Matter” narrative.

Michael Brown was a good kid, by accounts of those who knew him during his short life. But that’s not why his death is tragic. His death isn’t tragic because he was a sweet kid on his way to college next week. His death is tragic because he was a human being and his life mattered. The Good Kid narrative might provoke some sympathy but what it really does is support the lie that as a rule black people, black men in particular, have a norm of violence or criminal behavior. The Good Kid narrative says that this kid didn’t deserve to die because his goodness was the exception to the rule. This is wrong. This kid didn’t deserve to die because he was a human being and black lives matter.

3. Use words that speak the truth about the disempowerment, oppression, disinvestment and racism that are rampant in our communities. 

Be mindful, political and socially aware with your language. Notice how the mainstream news outlets are using words like riot and looting to describe the uprising in Ferguson.  What’s happening is not a riot. The people are protesting and engaging in a justified rebellion. They have a righteous anger and are revolting against the police who have terrorized them for years.

4. Understand the modern forms of race oppression and slavery and how they are intertwined with policing, the courts and the prison industrial complex. 

We don’t enslave black people on the plantation cotton fields anymore. Now we lock them up in for profit prisons at disproportionate rates and for longer sentences for the same crimes than white people. And when they are released, they are second class citizens stripped of voting rights and denied access to housing, employment and education.  Mass incarceration is The New Jim Crow.

5. Examine the interplay between poverty and racial equity.

The twin pillar of racism is economic injustice but do not use class issues to trump race issues and avoid the racism conversation. While racism and class oppression are tangled together in this country, the fact remains that the number one predictor of prosperity and access to opportunity is race.

6. Diversify your media.

Be intentional about looking for and paying close attention to diverse voices of color on the tv, on the internet and on the radio to help shape your awareness, understanding and thinking about political, economic and social issues. Check out Colorlines, The Root or This Week in Blackness to get started.

7.Adhere to the philosophy of nonviolence as you resist racism and oppression. 

Dr. Martin Luther King advocated for nonviolent conflict reconciliation as the primary strategy of the Civil Rights Movement and the charge of His Final Marching Orders.  East Point Peace Academy offers online resources and in person training on nonviolence that is accessible to all people regardless of ability to pay.

8. Find support from fellow white allies.

Challenge and encourage each other to dig deeper, even when it hurts and especially when you feel confused and angry and sad and hopeless, so that you can be more authentic in your shared journey with people of color to uphold and protect principles of antiracism and equity in our society.  Go to workshops like Training for Change’s Whites Confronting Racism or European Dissent by The People’s Institute.  Attend The White Privilege Conference or the Facing Race conference. Some organizations offer scholarships or reduced fees to help people attend if funding is an issue.

9. If you are a person of faith, look to your scriptures or holy texts for guidance.

Seek out faith based organizations like Sojourners and follow faith leaders that incorporate social justice into their ministry. Ask your clergy person to address antiracism in their sermons and teachings. If you are not a person of faith, learn how the world’s religions view social justice issues so that when you have opportunity to invite people of faith to also become white allies, you can talk with them meaningfully about why being a white ally is supported by their spiritual beliefs.

10. Don’t be afraid to be unpopular.

Let’s be realistic. If you start calling out all the racism you witness (and it will be a lot once you know what you’re looking at) some people might not want to hang out with you as much. That’s a risk you’ll need to accept. But think about it like this: staying silent when you witness oppression is the same as supporting oppression. So you can be the popular person who stands with the oppressor or you can be the (maybe) unpopular person who stands for equality and dignity for all people. Which person would you prefer to be? And honestly, if some people don’t want to hang out with you anymore once you show yourself as a white ally then why would you even want to be friends with them anyway? They’re probably racists.

11. Be proactive in your own community.

As a white ally, you are not limited to being reactionary and only rising up to stand on the side of justice when black people are being subjected to violence very visibly and publicly. Moments of crisis do not need to be the catalyst because taking action against systemic racism is always appropriate because systemic racism permeates nearly every institution and community in this country. Some ideas for action: organize a community conversation about the state of police-community relations* in your neighborhood, support leaders of color by donating your time or money to their campaigns or causes, ask the local library to host a showing and discussion group about the documentary RACE: The Power of an Illusion, attend workshops to learn how to transform conflict into opportunity for dialogue. Gather together diverse white allies that represent the diversity of backgrounds in your community. Antiracism is not a liberals only cause. Antiracism is a movement for all people, whether they be conservative, progressive, rich, poor, urban or rural.

12.Don’t give up.

We’re 400 years into this racist system and it’s going to take a long, long, long time to dismantle these atrocities. The antiracism movement is a struggle for generations, not simply the hot button issue of the moment. Transformation of a broken system doesn’t happen quickly or easily. You may not see or feel the positive impact of your white allyship in the next month, the next year, the next decade or even your lifetime. But don’t ever stop. Being a white ally matters because your thoughts, deeds and actions will be part of what turns the tide someday. Change starts with the individual.

This is a list of just 12 ways to be an ally. There are many more ways and I invite you to consider what else you can do to become a strong and loyal white ally. People of color, black people especially, cannot and should not shoulder the burden for dismantling the racist, white supremacist system that devalues and criminalizes black life without the all in support, blood, sweat and tears of white people. If you are not already a white ally, now is the time to become one.
People are literally dying.

Black people are dying and it’s not your personal fault that black people are dying because you’re white but if you don’t make a purposeful choice to become a white ally and actively work to dismantle the racist system running America for the benefit of white people then it becomes your shame because you are white and black lives matter. And if you live your whole life and then die without making a purposeful choice to become a white ally then American racism becomes your legacy.

The choice is yours.

*Disclosure: I work at this organization but the views expressed in this piece are my own and not necessarily those of the organization.

Janee Woods is a former attorney who is working for a nonprofit focused on supporting community engagement, strengthening democracy and fostering racial equity. Follow her on Twitter @janeepwoods.

The Politics of Fat: We Have to Keep Struggling to Liberate Ourselves from Self-Hatred

  News & Politics 

 

AlterNet / By Allison McCarthy

The Politics of Fat: We Have to Keep Struggling to Liberate Ourselves from Self-Hatred

“We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority. But we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans.”

April 4, 2012  |  

Last weekend when "Mad Men" aired its second episode of the season, viewers blanched to see character Betty Draper, a frustrated housewife with no personal or professional outlet, sink into a spiral of weight gain, self-loathing and emotional overeating, begging her doctor for diet pills. While today's viewers may find Betty's plight simplistic or pat, the idea that body image and weight were interrelated with feminism was revolutionary for its time.

In fact, it changed the way activists looked at their bodies and politics. Even as this intersection between food, body image and politics has been debated, critiqued and absorbed, how far have we come?

Psychologist Susie Orbach’s debut book Fat Is a Feminist Issue celebrates 34 years of providing theoretical and practical musings on the relationship between women and fat. The book is equal parts self-help advice, psychology journal, gender studies, and fat-acceptance theory. As feminist and fat acceptance movements evolved from second-wave protests to contemporary digital activism, Fat Is a Feminist Issue connected the dots between two parallel causes for human rights while championing the individual’s right to be healthy and happy at every size. Orbach’s pioneer insistence that feminists needed to talk about body image and compulsive eating, while fat activists had to acknowledge issues of gender and difference, united two notorious social-activist movements that made progress possible across a dual spectrum of civil rights.

The second wave of U.S. mainstream feminism appeared well underway when Fat Is a Feminist Issue came to prominence. At a time when feminist rallies and actions organized predominantly around the Equal Rights Amendment and changes in the workplace – as well as the emergence of fat-acceptance protests without a framework for understanding gender – Orbach wanted to explore the private lives of female compulsive eaters. For a fat woman operating in the public sphere, life “centered on food, what she can and cannot eat, what she will or will not eat, what she has or has not eaten and when she will or will not eat next… The obsession with food carries with it an enormous amount of self-disgust, loathing and shame.”

In 1970, the Boston Women’s Health Collective published a 35-cent booklet that morphed into the classic tome, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Eight years later, Fat Is a Feminist Issue showcased Orbach’s clinical, activist and often personal work battling fat oppression.

Within a few years of Orbach’s debut release making the rounds in book clubs and classrooms, the feminist backlash of the 1980s became all too apparent. Critics claimed that feminism’s modest (read: staggering) social and political gains were more than satisfactory. They wanted the general public to embrace post-feminist gender equality. Mostly, the naysayers got their way. Gone were the days of Orbach’s group consciousness-raising sessions, where community members shared stories of fat shaming, body dysmorphia and eating disorders — a public space that exposed a common hatred of fat and frequently female bodies while fumbling on the path to liberation. But where the groups left off, popular literature became the outreach to disseminate the gains of activists.

One of the author’s shortcomings in 1974 was the narrowness of her topic’s scope, particularly when it came to issues of race, genders other than cis women, sexual orientation, and disability. In the preface, Orbach noted that the groups of women she worked with were composed entirely of North American and European white women; similarly, discussions on queer fat bodies, trans* fat bodies, and disabled fat bodies (outside the purview of eating disorders) are not referenced in the text. However, as both feminist and fat-positive movements took their message to the Internet, conversations among various social justice-minded communities continue to expand.  

Several prominent feminist bloggers focus extensively on body acceptance, but their work often goes beyond the singular relationship of gender and fat. Writer and activist Tasha Fierce is a frequent contributor to Bitch and Jezebel and creator of the blog Sex and the Fat Girl, where Fierce documents her experiences as a self-described “fat, queer woman of color.” She is particularly passionate when addressing the intersectionality of fat bodies.

“Our approach to building fat community needs to be a comprehensive and all-inclusive one,” says Fierce. “White cisgender feminists who are fat need to recognize that there are different levels of oppression — not everyone who is fat is only facing discrimination because of their weight.” She pointed to a recent call-to-action by the organization NOLOSE which argues that people of color are too often portrayed as the impoverished, tragic face of a heavily politicized and trending obesity epidemic. Social justice organizers in both the fat-acceptance and feminist communities are responsible for facilitating inclusiveness within their ranks, she says. Fierce shared her insights for creating that environment. “When there are fat activist gatherings, the organizers need to make sure the venues and materials are accessible to those who use differing methods of communication — these are just basics to start with.”

Fierce is hardly the only feminist-minded writer who insists on an intersectional approach to feminism and fat positivity. Late last fall, Hanne Blank released an expanded edition of Big Big Love, Revised: A Sex and Relationships Guide for People of Size (and Those Who Love Them). Blank read Fat Is a Feminist Issue as a college undergraduate. Her vision for mitigating privilege is deceptively simple and profound. “Shutting up and listening with humility and openness to what other people have to say about their experiences and their needs would be a great start,” says Blank. “Then work on creating coalition politics.” There’s also the work of renowned womanists Renee Martin, Monica Roberts and Tami Winfrey Harris, who recently posted on the harsh criticism hurled at the overweight, middle-aged Downton Abbey star Brendan Coyle’s appearance in a love scene.

Even for bloggers who haven’t read Susie Orbach, her text’s influence is undeniable. Consider Arwyn Daemyir, who blogs at Raising My Boychick. Her 2009 post on the futility of dieting is particularly memorable. Daemyir’s mother was a subscriber to Radiance: The Magazine for Large Women and later provided her daughter with a personal subscription. Although Daemyir has not read Fat Is a Feminist Issue, her mother owned a copy. “I have a tag on my blog by the same title,” she says, noting the phrase’s influence. Yet Daemyir felt more influenced by titles that followed Orbach’s published work, including Marilyn Wann’s Fat! So? and Bonnie Bernell’s Bountiful Women, as well as the too-short-lived Hues magazine. Without Orbach’s contributions to the feminist and fat-acceptance movements, perhaps none of these works would have drawn in audiences from both sides of the proverbial aisle.

Orbach’s radical call for open dialogue on body image and eating disorders remains an essential text for generations of activists who struggle with understanding and accepting fat bodies. But the work is far from complete.

Within the movements, the same impossible questions cycle and recycle. In “Tiny Revolutions,” advice columnist Cheryl Strayed (writing as “Dear Sugar”) responded to a middle-aged woman experiencing bouts of insecurity at the thought of exposing her loose-skinned, not-skinny body to a new lover. Sugar poses a question that Orbach likely asked of her own clients in group sessions: “What’s on the other side of the tiny gigantic revolution in which I move from loathing to loving my own skin?”But was anyone shocked when Sugar pointed to a profound failure of the feminist movement to flip the script on body-hatred? Thirty-four years after Orbach sounded the alarm, there is still no collective feminist vision of the other side. “We claimed the agency, we granted ourselves the authority, we gathered the accolades,” Sugar writes. “But we never stopped worrying about how our asses looked in our jeans.”

Orbach can point to a number of changes in the treatment of fat women and diet culture after the publication of Fat Is a Feminist Issue. Eating disorders are not the hidden phenomenon of decades past. As an author, she may have been able to take some credit after Cosmopolitan ceased running a diet-tips column after the book’s release, but most of the mainstream magazines marketed to women, including Cosmo, would be hard-pressed to name more than a dozen instances of plus-sized bodies making front cover. Even in times of Internet connection and the subsequent fluidity of personal identity, fat bodies are policed and polarized into extremes. Feminism and fat-acceptance movements need Orbach and other feminist, fat-positive writers to establish correlations between body image and body acceptance. The revolution may still be possible, but it will require the collaborative vision of multiple communities to achieve.

Bernie Sanders Warns That Senate Vote To Repeal Citizens United Is A Pivotal Moment

 

Bernie Sanders Warns That Senate Vote To Repeal Citizens United Is A Pivotal Moment 

By: Jason Easley more from Jason Easley

 

Sunday, September, 7th, 2014, 12:59 pm

 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is warning the American people that country is facing a pivotal moment in history tomorrow as the Senate will vote on an amendment to repeal Citizens United.

Sanders is sounding the alarm bells that the country is facing a pivotal moment,

One day before the U.S. Senate votes on a constitutional amendment to restore limits on big money in politics, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called the drive to undo Supreme Court decisions that gutted campaign finance laws “the major issue of our time” and said Monday’s showdown vote is “a pivotal moment in American history.”

“Billionaires buying elections is not what our Constitution stands for,” said Sanders. He is a cosponsor of the amendment to reverse Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission and later court rulings that let millionaires and billionaires spend virtually unlimited and unregulated sums to sway elections.

“The major issue of our time is whether the United States of America retains its democratic foundation or whether we devolve into an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires are able to control our political process by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to elect candidates who represent their interests,” Sanders said.

The constitutional amendment will be obstructed by Koch funded Republicans who will do anything, including drumming up a fake IRS scandal, to keep the billionaire dollars flowing into their campaign coffers. Tomorrow’s debate is significant because the issue of Citizens United and the right-wing billionaires who are trying to buy our government are going to take center stage.

You will see Republicans like Mitch McConnell stand up and defend the Koch brothers’ attempts to buy the government as “free speech.” The rationale behind McConnell’s argument is that the people who have the most money have the right to the most “speech.” The problem is that free speech isn’t a commodity to be bought and sold. Money has nothing to do with the basic right to speech. 

There will be a parade of Republicans on the Senate floor who will march to the microphone and in tones of dire panic tell the American people that your liberty is at stake if the Koch brothers aren’t allowed to spend millions of dollars trying to buy the government. Republicans will be able to stop the constitutional amendment, but they are going to be forced to go on the record with a position on subject that they don’t want to talk about.

Monday’s vote is important because it is the next step in the movement to overturn Citizens United. The important thing to remember is that this is a movement. The easiest way to rid the country of Citizens United is to wait for a conservative vacancy on the Supreme Court, and tip the court more moderate direction with a liberal appointment.

Until that time comes, the foundation of our freedom will continue to be under assault from billionaires’ interests, and it will be up to leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders to mobilize the regular Americans to defend the rights of all.

Are We Wringing the Creativity Out of Kids?

HOW WE WILL LEARN

Are We Wringing the Creativity Out of Kids?

Annie Murphy Paul | May 4, 2012 | 42 Comments

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Do you think you’re creative?”

Ask this question of a group of second-graders, and about 95 percent of them will answer “Yes.” Three years later, when the kids are in fifth grade, that proportion will drop to 50 percent—and by the time they’re seniors in high school, it’s down to 5 percent.

Author Jonah Lehrer recently discussed the implications of these sobering statistics for education in his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. In a talk and question-and-answer session he participated in at the Commonwealth Club in Palo Alto, California, last month, Lehrer talked about why children lose their playful sense of creativity as they get older, and how we can help them hang on to it.

Lehrer began by quoting Picasso: “Every child is born an artist. The problems begin once we start to grow up.” Actually, Lehrer noted, the problems begin in a very specific time frame: the years covering third, fourth, and fifth grade. It’s during this period, he says, that many kids “conclude that they are not creative, and this is in large part because they start to realize that that their drawing is not quite as pretty as they would like, that they can put the brush in the wrong place, that their short stories don’t live up to their expectations—so they become self-conscious and self-aware, and then they shut themselves down.” Parents and teachers must intervene during this crucial window to ensure that children’s creativity doesn’t wither.

“Right now we are grooming our kids to think in a very particular way, which assumes that the right way to be thinking is to be attentive, to stare straight ahead.”

One such intervention: “We have to expand our notion of what productivity means,” said Lehrer. “Right now we are grooming our kids to think in a very particular way, which assumes that the right way to be thinking is to be attentive, to stare straight ahead—which is why we diagnose 20 percent of kids in many classrooms as having attention deficit disorders, when the research is actually more complicated.”

People with such conditions are actually more likely to become “eminent creative achievers” once they’re out in the real world, Lehrer noted. He cited research by Jordan Grafman of the University of Toronto, showing that distractibility can be an asset as long as it’s combined with a moderately high IQ. “When you’re distractible, you’re always grabbing at seemingly irrelevant ideas and combining them with other ideas. Most of those ideas won’t pan out, which is why being smart helps, because that means you can get rid of those ideas quickly,” he said. “But every once in a while, that new mash-up is going to be useful, is going to lead you somewhere interesting.”

Parents’ and teachers’ task, he said, is to help kids learn how to “productively daydream.”

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Lehrer’s second proposal: Teach children how to have “grit,” the perseverance and determination that’s required to create something new. He referenced the research on grit conducted by University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth, who professes the maxim “Choose easy, work hard.”

Lehrer elaborated: “What she means by that is that’s important to give kids a menu of possibilities pretty early on, a menu of things they might fall in love with—maybe it’s painting, maybe it’s drawing, maybe it’s writing, maybe it’s computer science—just a bunch of passions that they could discover. [You want them to] find these things that don’t feel like work, activities that just feel like fun. And then you have to remind them—‘OK, so you’ve found something you love, the goal you want to strive for. Now you have to work hard. Now you have to put in your thousands of hours of practice. Now you have to be willing to persevere through failure and frustrations.’”

With these key interventions, Lehrer suggested, children’s vital spirit of creativity can be kept alive.

10 of the Biggest Threats to Human Existence

AlterNet / By Larry Schwartz

10 of the Biggest Threats to Human Existence

Just in case you don't have enough to worry about.

Photo Credit: shutterstock.com

July 21, 2014  |  

 

The Walking Dead” is at the top of the cultural zeitgeist these days, one of the most popular television series on the air. In the show, a virus has ravaged the Earth, killing most of humanity, with the dead corpses rising to terrorize the few remaining living souls. While enormously entertaining, it is not a likely scenario for the end of the human race. Dick Cheney notwithstanding, zombies aren’t real. The end of humanity, however, could be. While it is difficult to envision a world without “us,” there are multiple scenarios staring at us, right here, right now, not far-fetched, that could wipe out all or most of humanity, leaving a wasteland for Mother Nature to reclaim. Here are some of the possible ways the reign of man- and womankind might end, no zombies needed.

1. Global Climate Change

Climate change is the Big Kahuna of all scenarios in which our presence on Earth is ended. Despite what the climate change deniers would have you believe, climate change is real. It is being caused by human beings, with a little help from lots of farting cows emitting methane, plusthat giant well of methane lurking under the Arctic ice. As we burn carbon and increase our meat-eating ways, more and more greenhouse gases are building up in the atmosphere. It is pretty easy to see the end game of this scenario. Grab a telescope and look at Venus, a planet with a thick, heat-trapping atmosphere and a surface temperature high enough to, well, melt lead. A few decades ago, climate scientist James Hanson studied Venus, and saw some parallels with what was happening on Earth. What he saw alarmed him, and he testified in Congress in 1988, warning our government that unless we changed our carbon-burning ways, we were on a course for disaster. Hanson got through to a single senator: Al Gore.

Meanwhile, the carbon keeps burning, the CO2 keeps rising, resulting in a slowly rising average Earth temperature despite the occasional freezing cold winter. On average, Earth’s temperature has been rising steadily since the Industrial Revolution unleashed our carbon-burning frenzy, resulting in a slow-moving train wreck. The hottest years in recorded history have occurred in the last decade. Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben outlines the situation:

“The Arctic ice cap is melting [releasing more greenhouse gases], the great glacier above Greenland is thinning, both with disconcerting and unexpected speed. The oceans are distinctly more acid and their level is rising…The greatest storms on our planet, hurricanes and cyclones, have become more powerful… The great rain forest of the Amazon is drying on its margins… The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years… [This] new planet looks more or less like our own but clearly isn’t."

Many environmentalists think we have already passed the point of no return. Once we pass a certain threshold, Earth will continue warming even if we do manage to cut our CO2 emissions. What we do know is that, if we don’t begin reducing the amount of CO2 we are releasing into the air, and at least minimize the damage, a planet-wide disaster is assured. 

2. Loss of Biodiversity

If we don’t melt ourselves into extinction, another possible route to end times is partly a byproduct of climate change: loss of biodiversity. Human activity is responsible for massive extinctions of countless species on Planet Earth. Environment News Service reported as far back as 1999 that, “the current extinction rate is now approaching 1,000 times the background rate [what would be considered the normal rate of extinction] and may climb to 10,000 times the background rate during the next century, if present trends continue [resulting in] a loss that would easily equal those of past extinctions.” 

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a major environmental report released in 2005, reported 10-30% of mammals, birds and amphibians on the planet are in danger of extinction due to human activity, which includes deforestation (resulting in habitat destruction), CO2 emissions (resulting in acid rain), over-exploitation (such as overfishing the oceans), and invasive species introduction (like boa constrictors in the Florida Everglades). “This rapid extinction is therefore likely to precipitate collapses of ecosystems at a global scale,” said Jann Suurkula, chairman of Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology. “This is predicted to create large-scale agricultural problems, threatening food supplies to hundreds of millions of people. This ecological prediction does not take into consideration the effects of global warming which will further aggravate the situation.” 

Amphibians, such as frogs and salamanders, are considered “marker species," meaning they provide important clues to the health of the ecosystem. Right now, the frog population, as well as other amphibians, has been declining rapidly. In any ecosystem, when one species dies, it affects other species, which depended on the now-extinct species for food and perhaps other necessities. When there is a sudden mass extinction of many species, a chain reaction can cause catastrophic results. There have been five mass extinctions in the history of the Earth, and many scientists are saying we are in the midst of the sixth. "We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change, and exposing organisms to intolerable evolutionary pressure,” states the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), in the biannual State of the Oceans Report. The next mass extinction may have already begun." What would that be like?  Well, in the worst one, 250 million years ago, 96 percent of ocean life and 70 percent of land life perished. What can we expect from mass extinction number six? We probably would prefer not to find out.

3. Bee Decline

Bees are dying—a lot of them, due to CCD, Colony Collapse Disorder. “One of every three bites of food eaten worldwide depends on pollinators, especially bees, for a successful harvest,”  says Elizabeth Grossman, author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health. Plants depend on spreading their pollen to produce food. Bees are pollinators. No bees, no food (or at least much less). As many as 50% of the hives in the United States and Europe have collapsed in the past 10 years. The suspect in bee deaths is a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids, pesticides used on a massive scale in commercial farming. It is believed the chemicals impair the bees’ sense of direction, preventing them from returning to the hive.

With reduced pollen in the hive, fewer queen bees are produced, and eventually the colonies collapse. The European Commission has imposed a ban on these pesticides after the European Food Safety Agency concluded that they posed a “high acute risk” to honeybees. The United States, however, has declined to join Europe in banning neonicotinoids, citing other possible causes of CCD, including parasites. Meanwhile, as Nero fiddles, Rome is burning and bees are quickly disappearing. It is not hard to imagine a scenario where resulting acute food shortages bring on mass starvation, war and human extinction. 

4. Bat Decline

Bees aren’t the only pollinators dying off. Bats, too, are dropping like flies. As a result of deforestation, habitat destruction and hunting, combined with a fatal fungal disease spreading among the bat population called White Nose Syndrome, bats are disappearing at an alarming rate. Besides contributing to the pollination crisis, the dwindling bat population brings about another possible human extinction scenario. As their habitats are destroyed, bats are increasingly crossing paths with the human population, in search of food and shelter. With bats come bat viruses. "It's very easy to see how pathogens can jump from animals to humans," says Jon Epstein, at the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit agency dedicated to conservation and biodiversity. Every year, on average, five new infectious diseases pop up, and about 75% of these new diseases come from animals. It is already suspected that human killers like Ebola emerged from the bat population. Might some new human-killing pathogen mutate from bats to humans and decimate mankind?

5. Pandemic

Which leads us to a related extinction scenario: a worldwide pandemic. New diseases emerge every year.  Some have the potential to devastate the population. In 1918, a strain of influenza spread worldwide and killed between 20 and 50 million people—more than were killed in all of World War I. In the past several years, diseases like SARS have come close to igniting into worldwide pandemics, and it is not at all inconceivable that, in our airplane-riding, interconnected world, some other virus could arrive on the scene with the virulence and transmissibility to decimate, if not destroy, the human population. “It is not in the interests of a virus to kill all of its hosts, so a virus is unlikely to wipe out the human race,” says Maria Zambon, a virologist with the Health Protection Agency Influenza Laboratory. “But it could cause a serious setback for a number of years. We can never be completely prepared for what nature will do: nature is the ultimate bioterrorist."

6. Biological /Nuclear Terrorism

In the interim, there are plenty of down-and-dirty, run-of-the-mill terrorists and the grand prize they all hope to get their hands on is a weapon of mass destruction like a nuclear bomb or a vial of smallpox virus. “Today's society is more vulnerable to terrorism because it is easier for a malevolent group to get hold of the necessary materials, technology and expertise to make weapons of mass destruction,” says Paul Wilkinson, chairman of the advisory board for the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrew. “The most likely cause of large scale, mass-casualty terrorism right now is from a chemical or biological weapon.The large-scale release of something like anthrax, the smallpox virus, or the plague, would have a huge effect, and modern communications would quickly make it become a trans-national problem. There is a very high probability that a major attack will occur somewhere in the world, within our lifetimes.” 

As for the nuclear threat, with increasing numbers of unstable countries like Pakistan and North Korea in possession of atomic weapons, the availability to terrorists seems only a matter of when and not if.

7. Super-Volcanoes

There are volcanoes, and then there are super-volcanoes. "Approximately every 50,000 years the Earth experiences a super-volcano. More than 1,000 square kilometers of land can be obliterated by pyroclastic ash flows, the surrounding continent is coated in ash and sulphur gases are injected into the atmosphere, making a thin veil of sulphuric acid all around the globe and reflecting back sunlight for years to come. Daytime becomes no brighter than a moonlit night.”

This lovely scenario is brought to us by Bill McGuire, director of the Benfield Hazard Research Center at University College London. About 74,000 years ago, the most powerful super-volcano eruption in human history occurred in Indonesia. It was close to the equator, and thus gases quickly passed into both hemispheres. Sunlight was blocked, and temperatures on Earth dropped worldwide for the next five to six years, below freezing even in the tropical regions. A super-volcano eruption is 12 times more likely than an asteroid hitting the Earth. Known super-volcanoes exist in Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. and Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. And then there are the unknown ones….

8. Asteroid Impact

Recent films like Deep Impact and Armageddon have dramatized this human extinction scenario, an asteroid hitting the Earth. Hollywood is Hollywood, but in 2013, a real-life asteroid appeared without warning in Chelyabinsk, Russia. About 20 meters wide, it hurled into the Earth’s atmosphere at over 40,000 miles per hour. Only the angle it come in at and its relatively small size prevented damage and destruction on a massive scale. But what would happen if a not-at-all uncommon mile-wide asteroid hit the Earth at this speed? Quite probably it would wipe out the human race. The tremendous explosion it would cause upon impact would fling so much dust into the atmosphere that the sun would be completely blocked off, plant life and crops would die, severe acid rain would kill ocean life, and fiery debris would cause firestorms worldwide. 

This has already happened at least once. The likely reason you don’t see any dinosaurs around the neighborhood is that they were wiped out by just such an incident. Donald Yeomans of NASA: “We expect an event of this type every million years on average.”

9. Rise of the Machine

We look to Hollywood again to dramatize our next scenario. The Terminator movies entertained us with killer androids from a future where war was being waged on man by super-intelligent machines. OK, we are not there yet, but as we program more and more intelligence into our computers, exponentially increasing their capabilities every year, it is only a matter of time before they are smarter than we are.  Already we entrust computers to run our stock markets, land our planes, correct our spelling, Google our trivia, and calculate our restaurant tips. In development are robots that look like us, talk like us and recognize our facial movements. How long before they are us, as we download our thoughts and memories into our hard drives, the so-called “singularity”? How long before these machines are self-aware?

Futurist and author Ray Kurzwell believes computers will be as smart as us by 2029, and by 2045 will be billions of times smarter than us. What then? Will they decide we are superfluous? Or maybe we ourselves will decide. Sounds far-fetched, I know, but some very smart people buy into this scenario; people like genius physicist Stephen Hawking: “The danger is real that they [super-computers] could develop intelligence and take over the world.”

10. Zombie Apocalypse

I know. I said zombies aren’t real. But there is a parasite called toxoplasmosa gondii. This terrifying little bug infects rats, but it can only reproduce inside the intestines of a cat, so it evolved a nifty little trick wherein it actually takes over the rat’s brain and compels it to hang out around cats. Naturally, the cat eats the rat. The cat is happy. The parasite is happy because it gets to reproduce in the cat’s intestines. The rat? Not so happy, one would suppose. Why should we care about unhappy rats? Because rats and humans are actually very similar, which is why we conduct so many medical experiments on rats. And humans are infected with thetoxoplasmosa gondii parasite. About half the population of the Earth, in fact. Now it so happens that toxoplasmosa gondii  does not affect humans the way it does rats. But what if it did? Viruses mutate. Viruses are manipulated in bio-weapons laboratories. Suddenly half the population would have no instinct for self-preservation. Half the population unable to think in a rational manner. Half the population suddenly very much resembling zombies. Nah. Couldn’t happen. Could it?

Larry Schwartz is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer with a focus on health, science and nutrition. He works at Scholastic Inc. in the classroom magazine division on Superscience and Science World.

Thomas Merton on Busyness and the Violence of Modern Life

New Wood

Thomas Merton on Busyness and the Violence of Modern Life

I think this is among the most important observations Thomas Merton ever made:


"The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. More than that, it is cooperation in violence. The frenzy of the activist...destroys his own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of his own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."


To think he wrote this half a century ago.  What would he say now?  What would he think of computers, email, cell phones--technologies that were intended to make life easier, and can, when kept in balance, but in the end have made "the rush and pressure of modern life" worse than ever.

I have seen and spoken to many people who no longer truly take a vacation, because wherever they go they take their work with them.  I have seen people use their phones to check messages during the middle of school concerts.  I have seen people do it in church.  I have seen so many restaurant conversations broken by texting and even phone conversations.

It is not that the technology is bad.  It is the way we let it control us.  Merton describes this dominant busyness of life as violence.  That might sound startling.  And he says that giving in to it is tocooperate in violence.  That is not easy to hear.  And yet that is why this passage is so important, too.

We have created a society that overly values both work and entertainment, and people use technology to switch off one form of busyness and switch on the other.  This is violence.  It is violence first of all to the human person, because we cannot either know or become our true selves if we don't have regular periods of reflection free from distraction.  Second, the busyness in both work and entertainment serves primarily material purposes, which are endlessly promoted as fulfilling hopes and dreams.  The genius of the system is that, even though these hopes and dreams cannot possibly be fulfilled materialistically, the tendency of the chronically distracted is not to doubt the system, but to become willing cogs in the great machine.  This is another form of violence to the human individual, and also feeds other forms of violence, such as crime, war, and environmental destruction.

Merton is especially addressing those who devote themselves to making the world a better place in some way.  I think of the two groups I am most involved with--those in ministry, and those in environmental education.  If the church in the developed world is failing, clearly the answer is not more programs, more bureaucracy, more meetings, more busyness.  It is more holiness.  And if we are using resources irresponsibly and setting the stage for massive economic and climate disruption, clearly the answers needed are unlikely to come from environmentalists who themselves are addicted to the lifestyle that caused the problems to begin with.

Merton's quote is troublesome, because I know he is right, and I also know that I, too, allow myself to get caught up in too many concerns, projects, and distractions, and that I, too, use resources at an unsustainable pace.  In doing so, I am cooperating in violence.  The fact that I cannot easily see this violence makes it all the more insidious.  I don't say this to beat myself up.  I know that I live relatively simply in comparison to the average American, but I also know that I can do still better.  I reflect on Merton's quote every so often because I want to keep growing, and it is easy, in an energetically materialistic society, to lose sight of the inner journey that can lead to the fulfillment that materialism will never deliver.

Posted 5th May 2011 by David Backes

Labels: busyness in silence spirituality Thomas Merton violence

  

Sociopath World: Guest post: Ayn Rand

Sociopath World

Guest post: Ayn Rand

I wrote because I've read you've an interest in Ayn Rand; I found this quote from her early private journals, which I thought might interest you:

"Some day I’ll find out whether I’m an unusual specimen of humanity in that my instincts and reason are so inseparably one, with the reason ruling the instincts. Am I unusual or merely normal and healthy? Am I trying to impose my own peculiarities as a philosophical system? Am I unusually intelligent or merely unusually honest? I think this last. Unless—honesty is also a form of superior intelligence."

This was written in 1934, prior to the publication of her novels, and representative of her less respectable "Nietzschean period" characterized by an overt sense of superiority over the human majority. I'm currently reading Anne C. Heller's biography Ayn Rand and the World She Made with a desire to understand Rand's psychology in light of neurodiversity. Rand is clearly a narcissist, and while too affective and inflexible for a perfect psychopath herself, she shows more than a few sociopathic tendencies as well as a consistent admiration for selective psychopathic qualities.

In relation to the above quote, I'm not at all sure that her mature universalism correctly resolved the question of her relation to the rest of her species. I wonder if her intelligence, low empathy, ambitious drive, social distance, public charisma, manipulative dominance, and purely intellectual conscience place her somewhere towards the extremes of the antisocial spectrum. This is certainly not a new idea for her detractors. I can't help but calculate that if 1% (or 4%) or Americans qualify as sociopaths, then Ayn Rand must surely have been more sociopathic by degree than 99% of any population.

War = sociopath breeding ground

Sociopath World

War = sociopath breeding ground

On the topic of whether sociopaths are born or created, I just heard about the Japanese movie Battle Royale, in which a class of high school students is sent to an island to kill or be killed until there is one left standing. According to an imdb synopsis:

At the dawn of the new millennium, Japan is in a a state of near-collapse. Unemployment is at an all-time high, and violence among the nation's youth is spiraling out of control. With schoolchildren boycotting their classes and physically abusing their teachers, a beleaguered and near-defeated government decides to introduce a radical new measure: the Battle Royale Act Overseen by their former teacher Kitano and requiring that a randomly chosen school class is taken to a deserted island and forced to fight each other to the death, the Act dictates that only one pupil is allowed to survive the punishment. He or she will return, not as the victor, but as the ultimate proof of the lengths to which the government is prepared to go to curb the tide of juvenile disobedience.

The students have varied reactions:

Some of the kids immediately embrace the carnage, others reluctantly join in for self-preservation, others gather together into smaller groups that war with each other, still others seduce allies in, only to kill them in short order, and still others kill themselves in refusal to participate in the violence. The problems arise even in the groups of trusted souls as a greedy suspicion grasps them all. Those that don't succumb to this violent infidelity, surely risk falling victim to their external classmates' hunts.

When I first heard about the plot of the movie, I thought the island was meant to serve as an accelerant for natural selection. Of course if you are putting high school students on an island with weapons, the only thing you would be naturally selecting for is sociopaths. Under my revised-per-imdb understanding of the film, the island is not just naturally selecting out sociopaths, it is actually creating them out of normal empaths. Do I think this actually happens in war and other times of exigency? Yes, I do.