Opening minds

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Satyagraha


The-way-the-world-works depends alot on our own choices. If we choose to be truthful and mutual, our world predominantly works in a much different, better way than if we don't.

Its not that bad people can't experience alot of material success; clearly they can. Its what they get to experience inside, constant strife and mistrust. Since we are not black-and-white, we can all experience this for ourselves, if we are just willing to look. Socrates said the tyrant, who is also the most unjust man, is the least happy.

We are urgently facing the choice of heading towards more tyranny or not, today.

One of the best books for cutting through some of the maze of propaganda, deceit and violence we are enmeshed in right now, is the private diary of Israel's second prime minister, which was published after his death. In it, we see not conspiracy theory, but conspiracy facts, from the first-person account of the leader who was involved.

http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/essays/rokach.html

Looking at the past with 20-20 hindsight will help us see what is going on now.

No doubt the average Israeli doesn't know these facts, much less the denial-squad outside of Israel. Its not that easy to see truth, particularly when you are enmeshed in concepts that cause you to dismiss any contradictory facts you come across as anomalies.
Israeli professor emeritus Jeff Halper speaks about some of the ways Israeli society deludes itself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gaV_Aj1710&feature=fvsr

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Iranians are just like us:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6ZX9aIfNUE&feature=related

We Americans need to speak out for peace with Iran.

And us getting our hate up about Israelis just makes the situation worse. Instead, we need to encourage Israelis to feel the security to restrain their government. Two good short clips of Israelis and Palestinians here:

http://www.justvision.org/budrus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiZ7vlRf8aI

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Jerry Brown for CA governor:

About 20 of us have been reading "I-Thou" together each Thursday evening. Martin Buber's "Paths and Utopia" describes the central question of our time: Will the state be called upon for more and more control of an anomic, disconnected group of people? Or will people form relationships in cellular-like communities, that will eventually form a community of communities, as the basis for organizing the world?

.... We're living in an unsustainable situation that is taking us in the direction of catastrophe -- social, moral and ecological. And it is my interest, perhaps my vocation, to resist that, and to work with others to provide positive alternatives

http://jerrybrown.org/


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Turkish Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk:

"What literature needs most to tell and investigate today are humanity's basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kin ... Whenever I am confronted by such sentiments, and by the irrational, overstated language in which they are usually expressed, I know they touch on a darkness inside me. We have often witnessed peoples, societies and nations outside the Western world and I can identify with them easily succumbing to fears that sometimes lead them to commit stupidities, all because of their fears of humiliation and their sensitivities. I also know that in the West, a world with which I can identify with the same ease, nations and peoples taking an excessive pride in their wealth, and in their having brought us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernism, have, from time to time, succumbed to a self-satisfaction that is almost as stupid."
—Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Lecture

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