The ‘Yes Men’ and the World Economic Forum

The film-making team behind The End of Poverty? have partnered with the Yes Men (global justice pranksters) to create a parallel, imaginary World Economic Forum in which world leaders came up with real solutions to poverty, instead of just pandering to their own wealthy economies. These guys are awesome.

The leaders seemed, in a series of videos, to be supporting a set of initiatives (which make very good reading) based on 10 Solutions to End Poverty, a petition for which the film-makers are trying to get ten million signatures by the end of 2010.

To check out the real World Economic Forum, go here… be warned, its not nearly as interesting.

Haiti and Pat Robertson

Haiti is plastered all over the news at the moment, and for good reason. At least 150,ooo dead, with an estimated 1.5 million left homeless by the 7.0 magnitude quake. In the meantime the delivery of aid has been hampered by the country’s shattered infrastructure and extensive  looting.

Many of us unfamiliar with Haiti and its history are asking why the suffering is as bad as it is. One man unfamiliar with this history, and it seems unfamiliar with much of reality, is Mr Pat Robertson. A televangelist from the US, Mr Robertson explained to his television audience that the plight of those in the island is a result of them being “cursed” for signing a pact with the devil. Check out the link for the whole story.

I’m sorry Mr Robertson, but your theology is that of a five-year old, and your lunatic ravings can be classified as anything but Good News. If this was a one-off occurrence I’d put it down to bad discipleship, but you’ve consistently revealed yourself to be a class-A clown.  This is cheap Spirituality at its worst, and Mr Robertson’s  ‘faith’ in Jesus is so far removed from the foot-washing carpenter I know and love that I wonder if we have even been reading the same book. My bafflement and outrage is shared by many, including my friend Jarrod McKenna here who blogs for Sojourners. Be warned.. his is a fiery, but moving, response.

A country born of slavery and revolution, Haiti has struggled with centuries of enslavement, crippling debt, exploitation, corruption and violence. When you look at how Haiti has been shoved around for so long, its no wonder things are in such a mess. If this is the result of a pact with the Devil, we only have the Devil of colonial greed, racism and exploitation to blame.

If Jesus were to give a news interview now on what is happening in Haiti, what kind things do you think he would say? What would he ask of us? How would He be seeking to transform and heal the situation?
For me at least, there are at least three questions He would ask of us:

• Why are the people of Haiti suffering so much?
• How do we help them?
• How do we stop this from ever happening again.. here, and anywhere else?

For the first question… well.. we in the general public love to point the finger at people like Mr Robertson. ‘What a jerk’ we say. ‘I’m nothing like him’. But having such extremists clogging up the airwaves with their antics can distract us from the real issues that are just too hard to confront.. how are we, or at least the nation states we belong to,  indirectly complicit in the suffering of Haiti’s people due to our collective amnesia over both historical and current injustices?

Secondly, if you haven’t already, donate to an agency in the field. Then start thinking long term. Read a bit about Haiti’s history here. Sign a global petition for the eradication of Haiti’s unjust debts here. Then do some research on debt cancellation in the third world and watch your jaw drop…

Thirdly.. well, this is our hope in Jesus.. that through his reconciling love and light we can take a good, hard look at ourselves, our personal failings and our societal sins, and work towards reconciliation and reparation. As Martin Luther King once famously said,

“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that a system that produces beggars needs to be repaved. We are called to be the Good Samaritan, but after you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to ask, maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be repaved.”

It will be a hard slog, but I can’t think of a more worthwhile cause.

Jazz

“And I recall, with feeling,

an instance of her song,

smelling like Jazz does when the lights are low,

luscious, languid, laced with soft sentiment,

painting everything it passed,

as it murmured through my moment.”

- Will Watterson, 2005

Night Fell

“Night fell

And we walked old paths

Become new in the velvet dark

We brushed by

The pinprick luminousity of a tiny hidden people

And held our breathe

Lest they be extinguished by it

We felt the flanks of gentle giants

Their ancient hearts rumbling

Beneath our fingertips

We sat in starry silence

As electric lights

Danced about the surface of a lily pond

Serenaded by the croaking chorus

Of invisible amphibians

We rested in the cool whisper

Of a burling brook

Talked of nothing

Talked of everything

Dreamt

Night fell

And we walked together

In company so strange, yet so wonderfully familiar”

- Will Watterson, 2004

Lord Monckton rap battles Al Gore

Oh man, this is good! Lord Monckton and Al Gore rant away with their side of the debate, whilst the host puts the whole climate change issue into a bigger perspective…

Cap & Trade

If you’ve heard about Cap & Trade, but aren’t sure how it works (or who benefits), this is the film is for you.

The Story of Cap & Trade is a fast-paced, fact-filled look at the leading climate solution being discussed at Copenhagen and on Capitol Hill.

Host Annie Leonard introduces the energy traders and Wall Street financiers at the heart of this scheme and reveals the “devils in the details” in current cap and trade proposals: free permits to big polluters, fake offsets and distraction from what’s really required to tackle the climate crisis.

Big Business, explained

Click below…

It is through them

Whenever I catch sight of others,
By thinking, “It is through them,
That I will reach awakening,”
I’ll look with sincerity and love.

- Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva

Why I boycott Coca-Cola

Earlier this year, due to a combination of badgering by my lovely workmate Jennie, and some research on my own part, I made the decision to boycott Coca-Cola and its products permanently. My investigations have found that Coca-Cola is a company that leads in the abuse of workers’ rights, assassinations, water privatization, and worker discrimination.

Whilst I expect to make very little impact on the company financially, I do hope my actions help inform others, and together we can bring about lasting change.

Below are some of the reasons I boycott Coke. You can find out more at www.killercoke.org

• Between 1989 and 2002, eight union leaders from their factories in Colombia were killed after protesting the company’s labor practices. Hundreds of other workers who have joined or considered joining the Colombian union SINALTRAINAL have been kidnapped, tortured, and detained by paramilitaries who intimidate workers to prevent them from unionizing.
• In Turkey, 14 truck drivers and their families were beaten severely by Turkish police hired by Coca-Cola, while protesting a layoff of 1,000 workers from a local factory in 2005.
• In India, Coca-Cola destroys local agriculture by privatizing the country’s water resources.
• In Plachimada, Kerala, Coca-Cola extracted 1.5 million liters of deep well water to use in their products. The groundwater was severely depleted, affecting thousands of communities with water shortages and destroying agricultural activity. As a result, the remaining water became contaminated with high chloride and bacteria levels, leading to scabs, eye problems, and stomach aches in the local population.
• Coca-Cola has caused Water shortages in Varanasi, Thane, and Tamil Nadu.
• Coca-Cola is guilty of reselling its plants’ industrial waste to farmers as fertilizers, despite its containing hazardous lead and cadmium.
• Coca-Cola is one of the most discriminatory employers in the world. In the year 2000, 2,000 African-American employees in the U.S. sued the company for race-based disparities in pay and promotions. In México, it fired a senior bottling manager for being gay.
• By regularly denying health insurance to employees and their families, Coca-Cola has failed to help stop the spread of AIDS in Africa. The company is one of the continent’s largest private employers, yet only partially covers expensive medicines, while not covering generic medicines at all.

Letter to Non-believers

from  Shane Claiborne.. you can see the letter in all its original Esquire-glory here

 

“To all my nonbelieving, sort-of-believing, and used-to-be-believing friends: I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has been Christians. Christians who have had so much to say with our mouths and so little to show with our lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten the Christ of our Christianity.

Forgive us. Forgive us for the embarrassing things we have done in the name of God.

The other night I headed into downtown Philly for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked down to Penn’s Landing along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn’t quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and go to hell if we don’t know Jesus.

Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut the hell up. A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself, I want to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, “God is not a monster.” Maybe next time I will.

The more I have read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination. But over the past few decades our Christianity, at least here in the United States, has become less and less fascinating. We have given the atheists less and less to disbelieve. And the sort of Christianity many of us have seen on TV and heard on the radio looks less and less like Jesus.

At one point Gandhi was asked if he was a Christian, and he said, essentially, “I sure love Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike their Christ.” A recent study showed that the top three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay, 2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much of that reputation is well deserved. That’s the ugly stuff. And that’s why I begin by saying that I’m sorry.

Now for the good news.

I want to invite you to consider that maybe the televangelists and street preachers are wrong — and that God really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit really are beautiful things like peace, patience, kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the ugly things that have come to characterize religion, or politics, for that matter. (If there is anything I have learned from liberals and conservatives, it’s that you can have great answers and still be mean… and that just as important as being right is being nice.)

The Bible that I read says that God did not send Jesus to condemn the world but to save it… it was because “God so loved the world.” That is the God I know, and I long for others to know. I did not choose to devote my life to Jesus because I was scared to death of hell or because I wanted crowns in heaven… but because he is good. For those of you who are on a sincere spiritual journey, I hope that you do not reject Christ because of Christians. We have always been a messed-up bunch, and somehow God has survived the embarrassing things we do in His name. At the core of our “Gospel” is the message that Jesus came “not [for] the healthy… but the sick.” And if you choose Jesus, may it not be simply because of a fear of hell or hope for mansions in heaven.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe in the afterlife, but too often all the church has done is promise the world that there is life after death and use it as a ticket to ignore the hells around us. I am convinced that the Christian Gospel has as much to do with this life as the next, and that the message of that Gospel is not just about going up when we die but about bringing God’s Kingdom down. It was Jesus who taught us to pray that God’s will be done “on earth as it is in heaven.” On earth.

One of Jesus’ most scandalous stories is the story of the Good Samaritan. As sentimental as we may have made it, the original story was about a man who gets beat up and left on the side of the road. A priest passes by. A Levite, the quintessential religious guy, also passes by on the other side (perhaps late for a meeting at church). And then comes the Samaritan… you can almost imagine a snicker in the Jewish crowd. Jews did not talk to Samaritans, or even walk through Samaria. But the Samaritan stops and takes care of the guy in the ditch and is lifted up as the hero of the story. I’m sure some of the listeners were ticked. According to the religious elite, Samaritans did not keep the right rules, and they did not have sound doctrine… but Jesus shows that true faith has to work itself out in a way that is Good News to the most bruised and broken person lying in the ditch.

It is so simple, but the pious forget this lesson constantly. God may indeed be evident in a priest, but God is just as likely to be at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute. In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named David… at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam through his ass and has been speaking through asses ever since. So if God should choose to use us, then we should be grateful but not think too highly of ourselves. And if upon meeting someone we think God could never use, we should think again.

After all, Jesus says to the religious elite who looked down on everybody else: “The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom ahead of you.” And we wonder what got him killed?

I have a friend in the UK who talks about “dirty theology” — that we have a God who is always using dirt to bring life and healing and redemption, a God who shows up in the most unlikely and scandalous ways. After all, the whole story begins with God reaching down from heaven, picking up some dirt, and breathing life into it. At one point, Jesus takes some mud, spits in it, and wipes it on a blind man’s eyes to heal him. (The priests and producers of anointing oil were not happy that day.)

In fact, the entire story of Jesus is about a God who did not just want to stay “out there” but who moves into the neighborhood, a neighborhood where folks said, “Nothing good could come.” It is this Jesus who was accused of being a glutton and drunkard and rabble-rouser for hanging out with all of society’s rejects, and who died on the imperial cross of Rome reserved for bandits and failed messiahs. This is why the triumph over the cross was a triumph over everything ugly we do to ourselves and to others. It is the final promise that love wins.

It is this Jesus who was born in a stank manger in the middle of a genocide. That is the God that we are just as likely to find in the streets as in the sanctuary, who can redeem revolutionaries and tax collectors, the oppressed and the oppressors… a God who is saving some of us from the ghettos of poverty, and some of us from the ghettos of wealth.

In closing, to those who have closed the door on religion — I was recently asked by a non-Christian friend if I thought he was going to hell. I said, “I hope not. It will be hard to enjoy heaven without you.” If those of us who believe in God do not believe God’s grace is big enough to save the whole world… well, we should at least pray that it is.

 

Your brother,

Shane”