If I Can't Dance

Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution."  That's how I feel.  I love to dance, especially Salsa.  Dance is such a wonderful way to express bodily joy.  It's a perfect celebration of incarnation, as children of Spirit, children of Earth. 

This video of a 92-year old grandma dancing Salsa with her grandson says it all.  If I keep dancing, who knows?  With God all things are possible.  Keep dancing.  

Celebrating in Ways that Bring Joy

There are many ways to celebrate the coming of the light in this dark season of the year, including the Winter Solstice, Hanukah, Kwanza, and Christmas.  Christmas is supposedly a Christian holiday, but the orgy of consumption that accompanies this holiday in the United States makes that questionable.  How ironic it is that people celebrate the birth of a poor baby born in a stable (as the story goes) by spending billions on "stuff" that will ultimately end up in overflowing landfills.  However, Christian or not, many are swept along by the dominant media message:  "Buy gifts for your loved ones to show them how much they are loved and how precious they are."  The pressure can be hard to resist.

This may not present a problem for those who practice a Christianity that is conformed to consumer culture, but for those who seek to follow Jesus it challenges us with one of his core teachings:  "You cannot serve both God and mammon." Mammon:  wealth, riches, money, stuff.   

If you haven't yet watched Annie Leonard's "The Story of Stuff," now is the time.  This 20 minute, easy to watch animation, will inoculate you against unrestrained consumerism during this holiday season. The sequels are also great. 

http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-stuff/

The Commercialization of Christmas challenges people of every spiritual tradition to resist cultural accommodation, practice integrity, and celebrate in ways that bring joy. I personally love going to Christmas concerts and street fairs, watching my grandkids in the Christmas pageant and the Nutcracker, singing Christmas Carols, having meals with my beautiful extended family, organizing crafts for the Sunday School children, spending an evening at Hospitality House (our local rotating homeless shelter), reaching out to a family in need, putting cedar branches and nativity scenes in our window sills, decorating a tiny living tree that we'll plant outside after Christmas.  

I plan, with God's help, to weigh my gift-giving choices well.  I hope to not find myself walking vacant-eyed down aisles of plastic toys.  

The organization "Alternatives for Simple Living" has a Treasury of Celebrations with some great ideas of ways to celebrate the different holidays, including Advent and Christmas.  Scroll down the page at their website to find out more: 

http://simpleliving.startlogic.com/indexoth.php?place=archives/TreasCeleb/TOCAdvent.php

May you experience and share the true gifts of peace, joy, and love during this season.

Witnessing at Beale

On October 30 I joined about 100 people for a demonstration at Beale Air Force Base calling for an end to drone warfare.  Beale is home to the Global Hawk Drone, a surveillance drone that is used to determine drone targets.  After stopping traffic onto the base for four hours, nine of us were arrested for trespassing onto federal property. 

I took this action because I am convinced that the use of drones for targeted assassinations is immoral and illegal and that their use threatens us all.  Now is the time to stop the new drone arms race in its tracks.  This act of nonviolent direct action at Beale was my way of witnessing to my hope that "another world is possible," a world based not on domination and violence, but on peace, justice, and environmental healing. My "no" of resistance is based on a "yes" of faith. 

The U.S. use of drones for extra-judicial killings is immoral and illegal under international law.  It assumes that the whole world is a battleground and that the United States has the right to inflict capital punishment without trial on whomever it has put on its "kill list."

Targeted assassinations by drones is not a clean as many people seem to think.  Many innocent people have been killed, including children.  In Pakistan, whole communities are paralyzed with fear because of ongoing drone attacks.  "Secondary kills," that is, drone strikes on rescue workers, if eyewitness reports are true, would constitute war crimes.

There are other complications to drone warfare.  Drones are sold on the open market.  Weapon manufacturers, whose sole purpose is profit, have no loyalty to any country but only to their bottom line.  Over fifty countries now have drones.  Most are currently used for surveillance, and in fact, many law enforcement departments in U.S. cities are purchasing drones for that purpose.  But drones can be equipped with weapons, and many countries already have weaponized drones.  With the United States setting the standard and leading the way, we are in danger of a drone arms race without an international legal framework for their use.

The public must become aware of the dangers of this deadly program.  We must rise up in resistance and demand that the United States propose, sign, and ratify an international treaty on drones.  Clearly, this is a tall order, especially given that the United States has not even signed the  Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention.  Such an outcome can only take place if there is widespread public awakening to the multiple dangers facing us as a species, and spiritual renewal motivating us to work together for global transformation.  This will entail a rising up of people willing to work for a peoples' democracy rather than acquiescing to the current system of global corporate rule.

In the next few months, those of us who were arrested at Beale will stand trial in federal court in Sacramento.  I'm grateful to have this opportunity to witness to my conviction that another world truly is possible.  

Resisting the Reign of Death

On October 30, I was one of nine people arrested at Beale Air Force Base for trespassing onto federal property in protest of the drones that are stationed there.  I'll write more about this later, but for today I want to make clear how this particular action fits in with other actions I've taken and my life overall. 

I have a long history of writing, speaking, and acting for peace, justice, and the environment.  Most recently, I have specifically focused on foreclosures, climate change, and the drone program.  What ties all these issues together?  I see them as various expressions of a global system that is working at cross-purposes with Love. 

I see my life work as preaching the gospel of peace, justice, and earth-healing in the midst of  a corporate-dominated global system that is idolatrous and violent to the core.  My book, Shaking the Gates of Hell:  Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization (www.shakingthegatesofhell.org), proposes a way to respond to the growing power of corporations and their domination of the worlds' cultures, governments, and global institutions.  Part I, "The Gates of Hell:  Undoing Creation," outlines the various global challenges we face today as a species, and makes the case that if we don't turn things around we face a living hell on earth of pollution, global warming, runaway technologies, poverty, inequity, violence, terror, and war.

The term "Undoing Creation" comes from theologian William Stringfellow:  "Violence describes all of the multifarious, inverted, broken, distorted and ruptured relationships characteristic of the present history of this world.  Violence is the undoing of Creation... Violence is the reign of death in this world..."

The gates of Beale, home to the global hawk drones, symbolize the gates to a hellish future.  For me, our nonviolent action there was a statement of hope for a transformed world.  Saying "no" to the Reign of Death is a way of saying "yes" to life.  

http://www.nukeresister.org/2012/10/30/9-arrested-blocking-gates-of-beale-air-force-base-in-drone-protest/#more-3313