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<back | home Quotes from Assorted Magazines “We need a transformative vision, one advancing the notion that America can be more than it is today for average, ordinary people. The Democratic Party should advocate a program of basic rights, like the one enjoyed by many social democratic countries in Europe.... Americans really feel that they have the best standard of living in the world. They don’t, but they don’t know they don’t. Virtually every nation in Western Europe has universal health care. In Sweden, Norway, and Holland, the social benefits are so generous that poverty has been practically eliminated. Wages in most European countries now outpace wages in the US.” -from Ron D. Daniels in Harpers’ (August 2004 issue) panel discussion called “Liberalism Regained;” the topic being how to build the next progressive majority. Of all the speakers, this quote is the most practical, in my mind. “Homeless Revive the Polish Countryside: where the homeless and the intentional community values coincide.” Psychologist Tomasz Sadowski created a program where 50 homeless people moved into three abandoned farms in western Poland. Most of these people were considered “impossible to reform” by social workers. After the farmhouses were renovated and local townspeople were found to be willing to help, the residents got busy growing corn, tending goats, keeping bees and cultivating herbs. The project has grown to five large farms and 30 smaller centers in various Polish cities. The project, called Barka, is spreading throughout Poland and into other countries. Go to www.barka.org . I want to join; how about you? Is there such athing as an abandoned farm in the US? - from Ode Magazine (July/August, 2004) p. 18 or go to www.ode.org Cults & Cultures “Cultures commonly employ the methods of cults, making their members subject and dependent. And nations at intervals march lockstep to enormity and disaster. A successful autocracy rests on the universal failure of individual courage. In a democracy, abdications of conscience are never trivial. They demoralize politics, debilitate candor, and disrupt thought.”By Marilynne Robinson from “The Tyranny of Petty Coercion,” in Harpers, Aug 2004. Chocolate, green tea, beans and red wine helps your heart According to Chemist Chang Yong Lee of Cornell University, though not necessarily in that order or right after one another. These can help you get enough antioxidants, which help prevent cancer and heart disease. Cocoa contains three times the amount of antioxidants found in green tea and twice the levels in red wine. Beans, especially the darker ones, when eaten three times a week give you the same amount of antioxidants as drinking a glass of red wine everyday. -from Ode, July/August, 2004 A new way to see “spiritual” films Join The Spiritual Cinema Circle. For $25 a month, you get 3-5 features plus shorts in the mail, on DVD. And you don’t have to return them. Go to www.spiritualcinemacircle.com for details. Tell them you heard about it in HopeDance. Corporate Warriors From the new Atlantic Monthly (September, 2004) comes a snippet from the book “Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry” by P.W. Singer. 1. 20,000 of these private corporate soldiers work alongside the coalition in Iraq. 2. Vinnell Corp. supplied and trained the Saudi National Guard at $831 million for 5 years (1998). 3. Onix International provided a team of former New Zealand special-op soldiers to rescue a businessman held hostage in East Timor. Cost: $220,000. 4. $19.9 million was awarded to CACI Systems and Titan Corp. to provide interrogation services in Iraq (2003 to the present). 5. $293 million for 3 years (2004) Aegis Defense Services provides security monitoring the reconstruction effort in Iraq. Read more on page 39. Bees Don’t Know they are not suppsed to fly “You have to see things as beautiful before they become so: You can find only what you want to find. The Navaho Indians don’t have stutterers because they don’t have a word for stuttering. They haven’t imagined it, so it doesn’t exist. According to the laws of aerodynamics, bees cannot fly because their wings are too small. But they don’t know this, so they fly anyway. Such ignorance provides the power to expand personal borders and realize a miracle. Protect your naiveté, which is your courage to start something the whole world considers impossible. People tend to say that I’m crazy, which simply means I’m doing something new.” -from Ode, May 2004, from Amedeo Maffei who can delete your past conditioning via electronic devices. He has helped Italy’s prisons with his new technique of a 4-day course. The follow-up study shows that previously, of prisoners who were released, 2/3 repeat their crime and return to prison. Of the convicts who took Maffei’s course, zero have returned. Because of this, the justice minister wants him to teach his course in all prisons in Italy. His center is called Sirtori. The publisher of Ode completed three session in 2003, and in subsequent check-ups, his forehead tension had been reduced, a sign of lowering tension in the brain. For details go to www.ode.org . What about that GMO Golden Rice? A few years ago, a small team of idealistic geneticists without industry support created a yellow rice with high levels of beta-carotene, which the human body converts into vitamin A. It seemed an important breakthrough, for blindness and vision impairment caused by vitamin A deficiency currently affects more than 2 million children, according to the UN. Press coverage of this “miracle cure” was enthusiastic, but closer examination has shown that instead of helping children at risk, the project is likely to repeat the mistakes of the Green Revolution while adding new hazards for ecosystems and human health. By reducing biodiversity, cultivation of vitamin A rice will eclipse alternative sources of vitamin A that are available in traditional agricultural systems. Women farmers in Bengal use numerous varieties of leafy vegetables that are an excellent source of beta-carotene. These who suffer from vitamin A deficiency would benefit more from the development of this sort of sustainable, community-based agriculture than from GM crops they cannot afford. In Asia, farmers often produce vitamin A-rich native greens and fruits without irrigation, whereas the cultivation of rice is water-intensive and would require the mining of ground water or the construction of large dams, with all their associated environmental problems. Moreover, as in the case of other GM crops, we still know very little about the ecological impact of vitamin A rice on soil organisms and other rice-dependent species in the food chain. - from Fritjof Capra, “The Hidden Connections,” Ode Magazine, May 2004 A Different Perspective on the Middle East “Of course, Bush is preaching democracy because that’s the platitude generated by the neoconservative, pro-Israel ideologues who have dominated his administration. It’s an excuse to avoid facing the truth, which is that our problem in the Middle East is our one-sided support for the terrible mistreatment of the Palestinians by the Israelis. That’s it. It’s not the conditions in the Arab world. It’s not the Islamic fundamentalists. It’s our own policy, stupid. How can we legitimately put pressure on Iran about its nuclear program while we remain dead silent about the nuclear arsenal Israel has already built? All the Arab countries and Iran have repeatedly called for a nuclear-free Middle East, but we won’t back it, because we won’t confront Israel about its weapons of mass destruction.” - from an article called “Islamic Democrats” by Charlie Reese in the September 2004 issue of Washington Report On Middle East Affairs. Thanks to the HopeDance subscriber who donated a subscription to our library. For info about how to subscribe or to check it out go to www.wrmea.com . I heartily recommend it for understanding events in the Middle East. Madonna Inn in SLO From the October 8th, 1968, entry in Thomas Merton’s Journal, Volume 7 (1967-68) titled “The Other Side of the Mountain”: “A feeling of over-saturation with talk, food, drink, movement, sensations. The Madonna Inn on the road (US 101) outside San Luis Obispo exemplifies the madness of it. A totally extravagant creation, a disneyland motel, impossible fairy caves, a waterfall that starts in the urinal when you piss on the beam of an electric eye, a hostess with a skirt so short her behind was almost showing.” (page 199) Thomas Merton is the great monk who wrote numerous books and articles including “The Seven Storey Mountain,” “Zen and the Birds of Appetite,” “New Seeds of Contemplation,” “The Asian Journal” and others. I discovered this book and passage while I was retreating at Immaculate Heart Center in Santa Barbara. Also, while I was there I found a most interesting book edited by Walter Capps, Lois Capps’ late husband, called “Preview of the Asian Journal” (Crossroads, 1989), a transcript of a talk and discussion Merton was involved with at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara before he left for Asia, never to return due to his untimely death. A quote that I found most interesting comes from Capps’ Introduction where he quotes Merton from his “Asian Journal.” “I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered over with garbage, Asian, or European or American, and it is clear, pure, complete. It says everything; it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we, Asians included, who need to discover it.” (p.23) <back | top^ |