Forward this to 10 people!!
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19259.htm
Conversations That Matter coming to Light ~ Vision of Love in Action ~ Waking Up Our Global Heart
Ready for a collective quantum leap forward and upward?
CYRES challenges you to be the change.
The Quest: Inspiring the eye of the world, making an impact, with a down-to-earth note.
Consciously creating change through turning thoughts around and inspired action on purpose.
Think differently and life will shift.
Ultimately, personal transformation leading to planetary transformation.
Self change inspiring Collective change.
A worldview that says, we're all in this together, no one is separate. All is love. All is sacred.
Is your vibration a match to love and peace?
Stimulating thought and action via this empowering video. An insightful look at conscious creation.
Cyres Café is about co-creating conversations that matter and befriending the earth. Keeping open to Love. Relevant and real for everyday life experience. Inspiration for action. Infusing the world with a blend of love, appreciation, and self empowerment.
Taking thought beyond. Changing the world, one thought, one action, at a time.
Join in.
Create Your Reality Experience Self
Calling you to bring about an evolution in consciousness via spiritually-grounded participation. Be vocal. Be visible. Stimulate thought and question thought. Experience conscious dialogue. Amp it up! It is love that can change the world.
Change, without wanting to change anyone else but yourself. Change from love and inspiration. Loving each other as we are now. We are all mighty fine as we are now. Magnificent magnets. No two alike, and, that which is like unto itself is drawn. Be yourself. Inquire, explore, discover more about Who You Really Are. We do not have to agree or disagree, simply be. It is our birthright to be happy. It is natural to desire more. Everyone has a different interpretation of what's right and what's wrong. Nothing is wrong; we can't do any of it wrong. It's a growth experience. 'Bad' is simply, only different than what you want. Don't we all have different wants? Could we respect that? I am what I am and you are that which you are and it's all good. Thankfully we are not all the same, and, even with dramatic differences between us, we can still feel good and appreciate and respect each other. Live and let live while simply being enthusiastic for more, eager for expansion. See the world through YOUR eyes, the eyes of your source, and consider what is really true. What you do with your life, is your decision. It's up to you.
This energizing video combines the worlds of self-development and hip-hop in a fresh brilliant blend. Serving up hot self help. Putting CYRES at the forefront of the Conscious Change movement.
Also view the "CYRES * Create Your Reality Experience Self * The Lyrics" video, the complement to this video.
CYRES, with radical spirit, takes you to fabulous new frontiers of self empowerment and oneness. Inner peace for outer peace.
From the prison of fear let's walk free, unbind ourselves from the negativity, free ourselves from feelings of inadequacy. Never mind what is. You have to see as you want it to be. Wake up and smell the coffee. Walk through the fears into the field of infinite possibility. Living authentically. Taking action effectively. Being, in your prime, much freer, forgiveness personified, clearly focused in one direction, stronger, successfully much more in control of your life. On track. Singing your unique song, in harmony with all. A symphony of activity, loving and appreciating that everyone has their own song to express. Equal parts that all fit together. Feel the One heart beat. In tune with who you really are.
The only answer that is helpful is the answer inside of YOU.
Together we can build a powerful foundation for appreciation and co-creation.
Allow this experience to create a Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Be a Cyres Dream Seed:
03:50 minutes of increased awareness. Dream awake, open your heart, expand your mind, take inspired action and reclaim your future, Now. We, in unity, are becoming more the possibility of a planet of higher consciousness. Waking dreams are being experienced more and more. What if all it takes is maybe 10% of the population, people like us, to make a positive difference, serving All Life. Expressing "The Power of 10", plant this Dream Seed, this CYRES video, forward to 10 Hearts, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj1RcJ... and ask them to make a difference by doing the same, and so forth. One Heart.
The emergence of new hope is with us. Discover more about this, in the letters "to The Power of 10", plus create commentary and expand the experience, http://www.cyrescafe.net
Namaste
CYRES
February 03, 2008
Activism: A message for you from Toronto
December 05, 2007
Carolyn Baker on What is to be DONE - redefining "positive"
| Thursday, 06 December 2007 | |
| This article is an excerpt from Carolyn's forthcoming book The Spirituality Of Collapse: Restoring Life On A Dying Planet. |
If we do not soon remember ourselves to our sensuous surroundings, if we do not reclaim our solidarity with the other sensibilities that inhabit and constitute those surroundings, then the cost of our human communality may be our common extinction.
I occasionally receive hate email but more frequently receive ones like this: "I've just unsubscribed to your email list. Your website is filled with negative stories and articles, and I need to keep a positive attitude and do what I can to make my world better."
How does one describe the tone of such a statement? Angry? Not really. Disappointed? Perhaps. Scared? Probably. But I think that righteous is the word I would use to describe this reader's perspective. By righteous, I mean a false sense of doing or feeling "the right thing", but the problem with a righteous attitude is that it often leads to detachment from reality-not unlike Barbara Bush's comment that she doesn't want to trouble her "beautiful mind" with statistics about troop or civilian casualties in Iraq. It's all so American/Judeo-Christian-and, of course, Dale Carnegie: keeping a positive attitude so that we never feel badly about what's actually happening.
How unfortunate that someone like me would ask readers to feel the depths of their grief, fear, anger, or despair about the death of the planet and its inhabitants and talk and work with other humans to prepare for collapse! A righteous attitude bypasses those emotions and makes the state of our planet someone else's problem, not my problem. It communicates that one is above emotions and really doesn't want to soil his sanitized psyche with them.
The addiction to a "positive attitude" in the face of the end of the world as we have known it is beyond irrational-even beyond insane. It's an obsession that could only be cherished by humans; it is, indeed human-centric, as if human beings are the only species that matter and as if the most crucial issue is that those humans are able to feel good about themselves as the world burns.
Usually, having a "positive" attitude about collapse implies wanting it not to happen, believing that it may not happen, and doing everything in one's power to convince oneself that it won't happen. This is a uniquely human attitude. If we could interview a polar bear who had just drowned trying to find food because the ice shelves that he usually rested on which allowed him to regain his strength during the hunt were no longer there, I suspect he'd reveal a very different attitude.
Now of course, we have the delusional human element who argue that humans are not killing the planet-as if the hairy-eared dwarf lemur, the pygmy elephant, or the ruby topaz hummingbird were responsible. Who else has skyrocketed ocean acidity to exponential levels, who else is inundating the atmosphere with carcinogens, turning topsoil into sand containing as many nutrients as a kitchen sponge, and is rapidly eliminating clean, drinkable water from the face of the earth?
Derrick Jensen in Endgame, Volume I, states that "The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of any economic system." (127) He continues:
Any economic system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and really stupid.(128)
Explaining human disconnection from the rest of earth's inhabitants, Jensen describes the various layers of resistance among humans to their innate animal essence. One of the deeper layers is our "fear and loathing of the body", our instinctual wildness and therefore, our vulnerability to death which causes us to distance ourselves from the reality that we indeed are animals. In fact, this is one of civilization's fundamental tasks. Have not all modern societies disowned and genocided the indigenous? And for what purpose? Not only for the purpose of stealing their land, eradicating their culture, and eliminating so-called barriers to "progress", but because native peoples (you know, "savages") as a result of their intimate connection with nature, are such glaring reminders of humankind's animal-ness. They are embarrassingly "un-civilized." Thus, modernity must "civilize" the savage in order to excise the animal, inculcating in her a human-centric world view.
The consequence has been not only the incessant destruction of earth and its plethora of life forms, but the murder of the human soul itself. Benjamin Franklin said it best after returning from living with the Iroquois: "No European who has tasted Savage life can afterwards bear to live in our societies."
Any person who wants to "maintain a positive attitude" in this culture-the culture of civilization that is killing the planet-killing people and things that we all love-that person is not only irrational and deeply afflicted with denial, but he is exactly like a member of an abusive family system in which physical and sexual assault are occurring in the home on a daily basis, but that family member insists on "thinking good thoughts" and resents anyone and everyone who says what is so about the abusive system.
So let's admit two things: 1) Humans are fundamentally animals. Yes, we are more than animals, but civilization with its contempt for the feral has inculcated us to own the "more than" and disown everything else. 2) The culture of civilization is inherently abusive, and it is abusive precisely because it has disowned the animal within the human. Indeed animals kill other animals for survival, but they do not conquer, rape, pillage, plunder, enslave, pollute, slash, burn, and poison their habitat-unlike those "more-than-animal" beings who seem incapable of not doing all of the above. Conversely, the "more-than-human" creatures respect their surroundings because they instinctively sense that their survival depends on doing so.
We insist that we are more intelligent than the more-than-human world, but a growing body of evidence undermines that assumption. Just this week, a Japanese study revealed that when young chimps were pitted against human adults in two short-term memory tests, overall, the chimps won. Researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University said that the study challenges the belief that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions."
Moreover, a British study at the University of St. Andrews confirmed that elephants keep track of up to 30 absent relatives by sniffing out their scent and building up a mental map of where they are, research suggests. Herd members use their good memory and keen sense of smell to stay in touch as they travel in large groups, according to a study of wild elephants in Kenya. Dr. Richard Byrne of St Andrews noted that elephants have two advantages over humans - their excellent sense of smell and, if their popular reputation is anything to go by, a good memory.
One may argue that neither a chimp nor an elephant could design a computer, but I ask: What is more consequential, the ability to design a computer or the ability to protect, sustain, and nurture the planet on which one resides? Of what value is the computer if none of us is here to use it?
Civilization, which has never ceased soiling its nest since its inception, has also never understood its proper place on the earth: that of a guest, a neighbor, a fellow-member of the community of life. As a result, everything civilization has devised and which is "unsustainable, immoral, and stupid", as Jensen names it, is now in the process of collapsing. I ask for an honest answer here: How can anyone tell me with a straight face (or a righteous attitude) that that reality is "negative"? Would the seagull on a Southern California beach with her feet entangled and bleeding in plastic netting left behind by "more-than-animal" life forms tell me that the collapse of what created her plight is "negative"? Would thousands of dead spruce trees in Colorado ravaged by beetles as a direct result of climate change tell me that collapse is a bad idea? Would the plankton and bleached coral at the bottom of the sea which are fading and dying with breathtaking rapidity as a result of global warming, tell me to keep a positive attitude and do everything in my power to stop the collapse of civilization? I think not.
Fundamentally, what all forms of positive thinking about collapse come down to is our own fear of death. Thanks to civilization's Judeo-Christian tradition and its other handmaiden, corporate capitalism, humans have become estranged from the reality that death is a part of life. Human hubris gone berserk as a result of a tumescent ego, uncontained by natural intimacy with the more-than-human world, believes humanity to be omnipotent and entitled to invincibility. Therefore, from the human-centric perspective "collapse should be stopped" or "maybe it won't happen" or "somehow humans will come to their senses". Meanwhile, the drowning polar bears inwardly wail for the death of humanity as the skeletons of formerly chlorophyll-resplendent Colorado spruce shiver and sob in the icy December wind. Our moral, spiritual, and human obligation is to flush our positive attitude down the nearest toilet and start feeling their pain! Until we do, we remain human-centric and incapable of seizing the multitudinous opportunities that collapse offers for rebirth and transformation of this planet and its human and more-than-human inhabitants.
News flash: We are all going to die! Or as Derrick Jensen writes in Endgame:
The truth is that I'm going to die someday, whether or not I stock up on pills. That's life. And if I die in the population reduction that takes place as a corrective to our having overshot carrying capacity, well, that's life, too. Finally, if my death comes as part of something that serves the larger community, that helps stabilize and enrich the landbase of which I'm part, so much the better. (123)
Now, I hasten to add that I am not suggesting we select our most intense emotion about collapse, move in, redecorate, and take up residence there. Feel one's feelings? Yes, and at the same time revel in those aspects of one's life where one feels nourished, loved, supported, comforted, and in those people and activities that give one joy and meaning.
Had civilization not spent the last five thousand years attempting to murder the indigenous self inherent in all humans, we would not have to be told, as native peoples and the more-than- human world does not, that most of the time, life on this planet is challenging, painful, scary, sad, and sometimes enraging. What our indigenous ancestors had and still have to sustain them through the dark times was ritual and community. Our work is to embrace and refine both instead of intractably clinging to a "positive attitude" in the face of out-of-control, incalculable abuse and devastation.
In his article "The Planned Collapse Of America", Peter Chamberlin asserts that a small group of ruling elite has been engineering the economic and social collapse of the United States for some time. While I agree and also fear the economic meltdown and social and political repression to which Chamberlin alludes, his perspective is once again, human-centric and Amero-centric. Reality check: Collapse is indeed happening, but it is occurring globally and threatening to annihilate all nations and all species. That collapse was not "planned" by ruling elites, and it is one in which all humans have participated. It now has a life of its own and is most likely, out of our control. Attempting to abort it or blame other humans is a waste of time and energy.
The question for humans is not: What do we do about collapse? but rather, What do we do with it? It holds inestimable opportunities for rebirth and intimacy with other humans and the more-than-human world, but only if we open to it. Opening to it means opening to our own mortality, which as Derrick Jensen insists, may be part of something that serves the larger community. Perhaps one opportunity collapse is putting in our faces is that of moving beyond our human-centric perspective-our hubris and addiction to invincibility, begging us to humble ourselves and crawl behind the eyes of the more-than-humans as Joanna Macy poignantly writes:
We hear you, fellow-creatures. We know we are wrecking the world and we are afraid. What we have unleashed has such momentum now; we don't know how to turn it around. Don't leave us alone; we need your help. You need us too for your own survival. Are there powers there you can share with us?
November 30, 2007
Re: planetization.org/Charles Sullivan/earthlings anonymous
This blog is an offshot of the underlying SPIRITUALITY of that group.
You could say it's my social "experiment" to see if it CAN work.
The solid basis for it is a sound appreciation that we really ARE one and that the faster we recognize that the healthier our personal outlook can become, and at the same time we try to stay OUT of denial and delusionville. I hand picked people I saw hanging around on threads and asked them to join, trying to create some synergy although I had people from EVERY WHERE I could join the first batch. But no one every really invited anyone else.
Beginning days were SLOW, but eventually some real intimacy was evident and the postings greatly increased. Now I admit it's a bit dead from time to time, but some others of us have really bonded very tightly. Maybe that's how it was supposed to go, but I think that people took more out of it, than they gave in most cases and you'll get out what you put in, even on the internet where you only have WORDZ, some digital pictures and the occasional video to post to get across who you are and what you CARE about. My telling you ALL about it, would take many pages, what happens/happened would obviously be a chapter in a book I "plan" to write!!
On occasion I bump into someone on the internet I can feel myself resonate to and I know immediately that person is on my frequency. I just KNOW, based on a dual-brained functioning I have which demands I pay attention to it. When I saw planetization.org, I just flipped!! A kindred soul, another of like SPIRIT.
We came together through this impeachment effort as someone sent me to look as they are posting around the ballots for a citizen's referendum. Cool. They are spiritual AND they are active. Now this is what was missing in the 1960s; there was an obvious split between my flower child self (and those friends) and my activist self (and those allies); a gulf I could never seem to close. Now in the year 2007, I am finding others who have been on this long journey, too, finding the answer is seeing yourself as part of the entire world.
Planetization is another thing to call it. But it's this profound sense that personal and social empowerment are precisely the same thing and the minute you can't focus your activities so that things are win/win, brother to brother -- you are screwed and so is everyone else.
It comes down to energy in the end:
externally and internally.
Where are ya gonna spend it?
How do you get it?
Who is benefitting from it?
As a species and as individuals we have a right amount of work to do -- together.
We are all suffering from trauma and post traumatic stress, is what I think. The political/financial system has ENSURED that this happens. And they don't want us thinking that there is anyway out. I think sharing and caring is the answer, by sharing our stories and lives with each other in an honest, open way and willingness to put back the BALANCE, we all get to where we and this planet needs to be.
Planetization Is Where America Left Off
Post 9/11
It captures all life — animal-human-environmental
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The Ghosts of Misplaced Conscience
By Charles Sullivan
11/28/07 "ICH" - --- Everything about
We tell ourselves that these events signal that we have arrived and achieved greatness worthy of respect and envy. They are a declaration that we have played the game and won; that we have acquired economic power that results in elevated socio-economic status and disproportional influence over the lives of the less successful; and those who have utterly failed or refused to participate.
We love to consume and waste with an appalling sense of entitlement. Our lives are enacted amid heaping mounds of swelling garbage and filth, while some of our fellow human beings pass lives of quiet desperation in cardboard boxes beneath our nation’s highway bridges, like beetles that move beneath the bark of trees: out of sight, out of mind, inconsequential—or so we think.
It’s a jungle out there where only the fittest survive. Those who cannot compete must not survive to reproduce; they must be expelled from the gene pool. Modern capitalism is economic Darwinism carried to the extreme.
Just as the continent holds lush temperate rain forests, so it also harbors deserts where only the strong and well adapted survive the harsh conditions of heat and drought and oscillating cold.
Surely the national pastime must be shopping, which has acquired the stature of a genuine addiction; a disease on a par with alcoholism and played with the passion of a competitive sport. Witness the insanity of black Friday, the busiest shopping day of the year where people are annually trampled at the doors of Wal-Mart in the quest for the latest incarnation of the X-Box. He with the most toys wins and the losers are trampled underfoot, ground into dust. Possessions matter more than people.
And we are a restless, fiercely competitive people—constantly on the move; a people that cannot countenance open spaces or unmanaged nature.
Hundreds of thousands of shopping centers and strip malls bear ample testimony to our excess, as do the mountains of debt that rise out of our spending habits like a newly spawned volcano swelling above a rising column of molten magma. Eventually they will become our gravestones—monuments to our lack of empathy and testaments to our unbridled greed and contempt for the earth.
The developers cannot relax until every inch of the earth is urbanized and paved and there is a McDonald’s and Wal-Mart on every street corner; a development in place of every orchard and farm. We cannot relax until everything wild and natural has been eradicated or imprisoned in zoos and admission is charged. Imagine a continent sized gated community for the well-heeled and the wealthy. The poor and destitute need not apply.
More than democracy, more than liberty, more than life—give us our shopping malls so that we can purchase happiness and fill our empty lives with possessions. Our senses are incessantly assaulted by merciless commercialism—we are programmed to consume and to be consumed by our programmers in the advertising industry whose job it is to plant the seeds of want in our all too receptive minds. Conspicuous consumption is the cornerstone of mature capitalism and no people in history have been more prominent consumers than we Americans—as measured by the girth of our waistlines and the girth of our mounting debt.
But as much as we are the products of Madison Avenue advertisers, we are also products of arrested psychological and spiritual development. We exhibit extreme pathologies because our lives are not rooted in nature and community; nor are they rooted in reality. Like spoiled adolescents, we have locked ourselves away with our box of toys and we call the world our own. We are a danger not only to ourselves but to the entire world. Quarantine should be drawn around us lest we infect the rest of the world with our madness.
Oblivious to the consequences of our own excess, our sphere of caring rarely extends beyond the self and our immediate families to the communities in which we are embedded that in turn spill into the great world beyond. We have erected psychological and physical barriers that isolate us from the rest of the world which have given rise to pathological visions of grandeur and exceptionalism. And, like a run-away virus, we are replicating our madness to the rest of the world which is, thanks to the disciples of Milton Friedman, seeking to emulate our example.
Better the world turn away and run for their lives as if we were infected with a new strain of pox or rabies. Better they should save themselves and let us perish, as will surely occur when we are consumed by the festering sewers of our swelling vanity.
We call ourselves a free people but we are prisoners of our own petty desires; prisoners of greed and excess and manufactured want; the products of capitalism taken to the extreme—replicating with the ease of cancer cells unrestrained by reason or empathy for others and for the earth. The world cannot tolerate another
We go on as if there are no consequences to what we do, ignoring the wolves baying at our door and the grim reaper peering at us through the curtain. We tell ourselves they are only apparitions of conspiracy theorists and alarmists, the ghosts of misplaced conscience.
Millions of Americans are experts at self-denial and delusional to the extreme, while others are realists and components of active resistance. But, cause and effect rarely enters our vocabulary. History, science and ethics are not our strengths—we prefer to go shopping or watching television, giving no thought to the kind of world we are leaving our children and their off spring, much less the offspring of other species. We hold that the universe turns on its axis and we are its center; but it is not so.
As a result of our excesses, terms such as ‘peak oil’ and ‘peak water’ have come into existence. Gluttony occurs on one end of the supply chain at the expense of the other; just as food webs are affected by events occurring at all parts of an ecological web the size of the world. One cannot pluck a flower without also troubling a star. All things are interconnected.
How easily we forget that commercial exuberance rests on the broken bodies of the exploited worker; it rests on the scrolls of flora and fauna that have been pushed out of existence because there isn’t enough room for them and us with all of our precious, energy consuming toys.
Thus we live in a world that is not enriched by our example but is diminished by us. Injustice is a byproduct of commercial exuberance as manifested by declarations of superiority through class warfare and other avenues of inequality. And it is felt in the dimly lit sweatshop somewhere in the belching slums of industrialized
True, capitalism has made cheap products available to the voracious American consumer; but it has also given the world preemptive war and famine, global corporatism, pestilence and wage slavery; it has stoked the fires of mass extinction, global warming and ecological collapse—all of which have acquired an unstoppable momentum of their own with unimaginable consequences that extend indefinitely into an already uncertain future. There are consequences to everything we do, just as there are consequences to inaction.
Yet it is increasingly obvious that too few of us care enough to take action, as long as we are free to buy and to consume. We keep the consequences of gluttony out of sight and out of mind and pretend they aren’t there. But they are present and they matter.
And this brings me to the main point of my essay: it cannot go on. The age of exuberance—like the age of cheap oil—is mercifully drawing to a close. So I will say what was never meant to spoken aloud in the land of excess; and I will say it loud and clear so that it cannot be mistaken: Americans must dramatically simplify their lives to want less and learn more. We constitute less than five percent of the of the world’s population while usurping more than a quarter of her bounty. This is not acceptable—nor is it ethical.
No one has a moral right to take more than their fair share when that taking jeopardizes the chances of others of living a decent life, or makes nil their chances for survival—including other species.
Contrary to what one might think, we do not have to live like third world nations or like the hunters and gatherers of the past. But we must dramatically reduce our consumption and shrink our carbon footprint. Not only must we live within our own means but within the means of the planet to support us.
The majority of our food should be locally grown and mass transit must supplant the gluttonous and polluting automobile that proliferates on our nation’s highways. Moratoriums on development and urban sprawl must be enacted in order to protect critical habitat and rainwater recharge areas. Cities and towns must be redesigned and revitalized with sustainable industry. Goods and services, including work and jobs must again, as they were in the past, be rooted in vibrant, small scale local economies; and free trade agreements revoked.
Technological advances—no matter how boldly they are touted as saviors of humankind cannot increase the world’s carrying capacity and they cannot invoke justice. The latter is entirely up to us as sentient beings endowed with conscience. And this brings me to a second point: we must reduce the human population through adoption and cease to procreate for at least one generation—so that the earth can recover her carrying capacity. What better way to save the world, literally.
Simultaneously simplifying our lives by wanting less and reducing the human population will allow room for other people and other beings to share the bounty of the earth. And it will almost certainly have a beneficent rather than pathological social and psychological consequence: it will end our isolation and reconnect us to the rest of the world. We could finally realize our enormous potential to become world citizens and good neighbors worthy of respect and love.
Rather than an economy based upon savage greed and exploitation, let us create an economy based upon justice and equality, need rather than excess; a society that does not leave people behind but invites the full participation of everyone and recognizes that, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” Let it be all inclusive and worthy of respect: where every woman, man, and child, every being of this earth is the same under the law and equally respected and valued—a great global community seeking harmony rather than competitive advantage.
In the end, equality is beholden to the system we choose. Did we ask that the world be run on the profits of greed, or the prophets of wisdom? Where was that democratic choice? The profits of greed have given us voracious greed, consuming everything in sight; but they didn’t give us a choice; they took away our freedom and made us into lesser beings. But, if we are to muster ourselves to call ourselves Human one last time, where the prophets of wisdom really did have something to say, where people and the planet are put before profits in the Golden Rule, and where we have one large collective foot standing on the profit of greed then maybe, maybe YES we will turn this thing around:
Charles Sullivan is a nature photographer, free-lance writer, and community activist residing in the Ridge and
| Earthlings_Anonymous |
When anyone, anywhere reaches out for help, I want the hand of Earthlings Anonymous to always be there. And for that, I AM Responsible.
You are part of the ONEiverse.
As I love the ONE I love you as I am now able.
Grant us the courage to change what we can, the serenity to accept what we cannot change- and the wisdom to know the difference.
The Killing Must Stop Save our Mother Earth Consume less and share more Take some time for an earth walk today
Some sloganz: Surf's UP! Ride the waves! Coincidence ... or SYNCHRONICITY??!! Can you hear the BUZZ? Less babble, more DO. Who we are and what we do MATTER. Always do your best.
________________________________________
YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS
Visit the home page of www.groups.yahoo.com/group/earthlings_anonymous.
Membership: contact ladybroadoak@gmail.com
Should your wish to join, you must provide us with an email address
from your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
<<:>> <<:>> <<:>> <<:>> <<:>> <<:>> <<:>> <<:>>
May 01, 2007
If'n you do, PLEASE follow the instructions below. Remember we have to work at this day after day. This is called "political participation", but what it REALLY is spiritual activism and taking responsibility for the health, welfare and happiness of the next seven generations.
You've got a few minutes to spare for that, don't you?
Petition to the Congressional Black Caucus
CBC Watch - CBC Monitor Update
Thursday, 01 March 2007
DEMAND THAT THE CONGRESSIONAL BLACK
CAUCUS TAKE A STAND ON KEY ISSUES
The Congressional Black Caucus, or CBC ought to represent the political will of Black America. Otherwise it has no reason to exist. Despite the great work of some Black representatives in Congress, the Caucus as a whole has failed to live up to its role as the principal advocate for African American communities on the national stage.
The petition contains 7 points which we believe rank high among the widely accepted and basic "bright lines" of Black political opinion in the U.S. They are spelled out in detail below, and also listed on the petition site:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/cbcmonitor/
Here they are in brief:
WE DEMAND THAT THE CBC, INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY, TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION TO:
1. DISMANTLE RACIALLY SELECTIVE MASS INCARCERATION, beginning with action to sunset or repeal all mandatory sentencing legislation, eliminate the differential in penalties for crack and powdered cocaine, and halt privatization of prisons and prison health services. America's prison population has multiplied eightfold since 1970. African Americans are one-eighth of this nation, but fully half of her prisons and jails. Mass Black incarceration is a national public policy that destroys the prospects for progress in every arena of African American life.
2. AID AND EMPOWER THOSE DISPERSED AND DISPOSSESSED BY KATRINA through legislation that specifically recognizes the rights of hundreds of thousands of exiles to return to their communities under conditions of adequate housing, schools, health care, and social support. The CBC must demand that destruction of public housing and other affordable dwellings cease, and that affordable housing be constructed for the 70 percent of uprooted residents who were renters. Not one federal dime should be spent for programs that lead to further gentrification of New Orleans. The CBC should establish its own permanent Watchdog Unit to monitor all reconstruction activities.
3. END THE WAR IN IRAQ NOW through support of the Woolsey-Waters-Lee "Bring the Troops Home and Iraqi Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2007"; H.R. 508, and renunciation of George Bush's pre-emptive war doctrine in all its manifestations. The Bush war policy is a formula for endless global conflict, deterioration of the rule of law among nations, and growing impoverishment, indebtedness and evisceration of civil liberties at home. Further, the CBC must resist all attempts to draw the U.S. into war with Iran, and block covert and overt U.S. schemes for "regime change" elsewhere in the world, most notably in Venezuela.
4. GET THE U.S. MILITARY OUT OF AFRICA by withholding funds and authorization for a permanent string of U.S. military bases throughout oil-rich regions of Africa, from Djibouti and Ethiopia in the east to the Gulf of Guinea in the west. In January, the White House created a Pentagon Africa Command as part of its so-called Global War on Terror, thus targeting the continent for further militarization and destabilization. The CBC must create its own Watchdog Unit to monitor and expose administration plans to make Africa the next front in its wars to seize the world's resources.
5. TRANSFORM THE CITIES AND CREATE MILLIONS OF JOBS through a massive program similar to the U.S. post-war Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe, or the much larger federal programs that established national infrastructure necessary for the creation of an almost exclusively white American suburbia during the same period. Integral to this project must be creation of GOOD JOBS AT GOOD WAGES for the residents of the cities, good schools to educate young people who will fill those jobs, and democratic participation of residents in the transformation of their neighborhoods and hometowns. The CBC must unequivocally support the Employee Free Choice Act and other measures that allow employees on any job to organize unions wherever and whenever they choose.
6. ESTABLISH TRULY UNIVERSAL, SINGLE PAYER HEALTH CARE for all Americans, by endorsing HR 676, co-sponsored by Reps. John Conyers and Dennis Kucinich, as a first step toward a single payer system of national health insurance. 15-30% of every American health care dollar pays for advertising, shareholder profit and other non-health care costs. Medicare, Medicaid and single payer systems like the Canadian one spend 97 to 99 cents of every dollar on health care. These are the only practical ways to deliver health care to all Americans. Any proposal that further entrenches private profit further delays the advent of a genuine national health care program, thus making inevitable the unnecessary death of millions of Americans.
7. ENSURE VOTING RIGHTS through measures to require verifiable paper trails, along with enforceable guarantees that every citizen has an equal opportunity to vote, and an equal chance to see that vote counted. The 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were both thrown by the selective nullifications of tens of thousands of black votes in Florida and Ohio. The CBC must support all measures that reinstate the franchise to persons who have served out their criminal sentences.
Sign the petition with your name, email address, state and zipcode, and
The best members of the Black Caucus, like John Conyers, Bobby Scott, Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee will tell you they share these concerns. But but in the next breath they often say they are dependent on us for vocal, insistent and even impolite affirmation of our priorities as a people --- not just on election day, but every day of the year.
African American leaders above have thrown the burden back upon us below, demanding leadership from ordinary people to keep them focused upon our urgent priorities. It's up to us to give it to them. Sign the petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/cbcmonitor/
We'd like to get 50,000 people to sign the petition, and will present the list of signers to the Congressional Black Caucus later this year. These 7 demands certainly don't cover every burning issue that concerns our people. But they're a start.
After signing the petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/cbcmonitor, copy this page and paste it into an email message you can forward to everyone on your email list. Call up a few of them to explain what it is, and ask them to sign the petition and pass it on.
Let's give the Congressional Black Caucus some Leadership From Below.
Respectfully,
Bruce Dixon, Managing Editor, Black Agenda Report
Glen Ford, Executive Editor, Black Agenda Report
Leutisha Stills, Correspondent, CBC Monitor
Dr. Jared Ball, co-founder, CBC Monitor
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