SCHEDULE OF FEBRUARY APPEARANCES
February 1 – S.F. Occupy Forum at 6 PM
Global
Exchange
2017
Mission St. at 16th Street 2nd floor
San
Francisco
February 13 - PEN WEST at 3 PM
home
of Margret Schaefer
1 Quail Avenue, Berkeley
RSVP
& directions: margretschaefer@mac.com
February 25 – Ethnic
Studies Library at 5:30 PM
30
Stephens Hall (downstairs)
University of California
info: 642-3947
To create peace in the
world, how radically would we have to change our thinking?
info: 642-3947
Whenever I talk about Apology
to a Whale: Words to Mend a World, I find new ways of approaching a complex
subject, and new approaches to my audiences. January 24 addressing an audience
of peace activists, I asked for a show of hands: how many folks have
volunteered for various kinds of peace activism? And of those folks, how many
are convinced that by nature, humans are irredeemably warlike, making conflict a
“done deal?”
The good news is that humans have not always been warlike,
but to support that view we have to search before history, before HIS story, to a time before patriarchy
overtook the world.
I love talking about this book, how I started with a
question, and an intuition, and how more and more my research took on the
character of a detective story, an investigation of a crime which took place
some six thousand years ago, and whose consequences are still being felt throughout
the entire world today.
Links to some of the
interviews I have given so far include:
Kate Raphael on
“Women’s Magazine” on KPFA: starts at 12:00 minutes in
Lisa Savage
interviews Cecile Pineda for Went 2 the Bridge:
https://went2thebridge.blogspot.com/2016/01/interview-cecile-pineda-author-of.html
Pineda talks to Tom
Klammer at KKHI: http://tellsomebody.libsyn.com/apology-to-a-whale-words-to-mend-a-world
MAKING IT WORK
This month, I’ve happened on three places in the world where
people have allowed themselves new (and very old) ways of thinking:
Kalamazoo, Michigan:
In 2005, anonymous donors initiated a program called Promise, that guarantees any high school student with acceptable
grades free college tuition at a public, in-state school. Of Kalamazoos
students, 44% are African American, one in three falls beneath the national
poverty level, and one in twelve is
homeless. The program has re-vitalized a hollowed out community where most of
the large business have shut down, been outsources, or acquired by larger
corporations. But since its inception, the program has changed the spirit of
Kalamazoo. It has motivated students, teachers, and families. It has prompted
teachers to revise their teaching schedules to provide students with remedial
work in math and reading, increasing grade proficiency by at least one grade.
But most impressive is the systemic change it has brought to
the entire city, extending to the nearby suburbs. From the long-range returns
to the community by an educated, innovative work force, a higher tax base and a
more energized business environment. Fringe
benefits have included better nutrition for children, better housing, medical
care, and universal pre-kindergarten programs.
It has stopped urban flights, and
fostered the construction of new schools both in Kalamazoo itself and in
surrounding suburbs. It has attracted more students, and with each new student,
guaranteed another $7,250 a year from the state. New teachers can be hired for
every additional 25 students, and hundreds have been hired so far. The district
has been able to upgrade existing facilities, and passed bond issues to finance
the construction of new schools.
A high dropout rate persists despite these changes. One-third
of students failed to graduate, and a disproportionate number of them are Black
males, a phenomenon which suggests that such students still find school
programs irrelevant to their lives. But the good news is that Kalamazoo’s
Promise program has spread to at least 25 American cities, among them
Pittsburgh, Denver, Peoria, and Ventura to name a few. For more background go to
Albuquerque, New
Mexico: In 2015 the City of Albuquerque initiated There’s a Better Way,
a program to reduce homelessness. The homeless policy of many other cities, San Francisco and
Berkeley among them, seeks to penalize poverty, an archaic holdover from
Plymouth Rock, and of the Puritan legacy in American culture that upholds the
belief that if folks are poor, it must be because they deserve it; and if
people are rich, they don’t need to share. But a few cities, Albuquerque among
them, has a mayor, Richard Berry, who thinks that housing people makes more sense than citing and jailing them, and sending
them to the ER in health emergencies.
What’s interesting about Albuquerque’s program is that the city partners with a
program already in place, St. Martin’s Hospitality Center, the non-profit that
connects folks with housing, employment and mental health services. It pays the
salary of Will Cole, a van driver, who trolls the city’s streets once a week,
looking for homeless folks who may prefer working for a day tidying up the city
at $9.00 an hour to panhandling on the streets. But most remarkably, a video
shows Cole, who is Black, shaking hands with all the folks he meets and
treating them with consummate courtesy
and respect.
Blue and white signs have been posted at major intersections listing a 311
number and website where panhandlers can connect with services, Not only:
motorists can visit the website, too, and donate to local shelter, food bank,
or the employment fund that pays for the day-workers’ wages!
Bayt Ghazy, Yemen: “I
would carry him over my back and run amongst the people.” So said the
brother of a man soon to be released after 13 years from imprisonment at the
age of 17 in the hell-hole of Guantanamo back to his small village in Yemen. I
have saved the best for last: a visit to Fahd, and to a paradise-on-Earth, a
village in the country Saudi Arabia, with the complicity of the United States
and Britain, is bombing back to the stone age
"Waiting for Fahd:One Family’s Hope for Life Beyond Guantanamo." Your visit to this village will
be a short one (no more than 10 minutes) but to those who have lived there all
their lives, truly there is nothing closer to paradise on Earth. As his waiting
wife says: “God will bless him because he will be released and we can live on
Earth together.”
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