American Dream | Achieving the Dream

What is the dream and who can achieve it?

The United States of America is the land of great opportunity, in which people can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and give their children better than they had.  This idealistic vision is the American Dream. In addition to improving chances for children, the Dream also typically includes home ownership, having a chance to get rich and achieving a secure retirement. The Dream finds its roots in our Declaration of Independence which states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  As humans, life has been given to us.  Liberty is established through the social contract.  The Pursuit of Happiness — that is the promise of the American Dream.

The term was made popular by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 book, The Epic of America.  According to Adams, the term was “that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life for all our citizens of every rank.”

However, the idea of the American Dream is neither simple nor universal.   Americans oddly tend to hold contradictory views of ways to achieve success.  We simultaneously think that people should get out of the system what they put into it (an idea called meritocracy), and that people should be able to pass wealth generationally, thus effectively nullifying a meritocratic system.  The tensions between these widely held views are what makes the Dream complex.

The American Dream is the great American story.  It is given power at least partially by what Max Weber called the Protestant Ethic, which taught that hard work and prosperity are signs of the achievers’ place in heaven and of God’s favor towards them.  The Protestant Ethic contributed to America’s financial success.  We worked hard, saved and spent frugally.  Protestantism also affected how we view work.  Martin Luther taught that all work, not just ordained ministry, was a sacred thing.  In a sermon, Luther preached that, “every occupation has its own honor before God, as well as its own requirements and duties.”  This dedication to work from the 16^th century is evident to us in the 21^st through the nation of workaholics.  Once Americans decided work was a positive, we took it to the extreme.  Because of this Protestant framework, Americans came to view work as an opportunity, not merely a necessity.

Stories of the American Dream are ubiquitous in the American Experience.  Indeed, they portray some of our greatest figures such as Abraham Lincoln who was famously born in a log cabin and rose, due to his intellect and work ethic, to become one of the nation’s most visionary presidents.  In the present day, two O’s tell the story of the Dream: Oprah and Obama.  Oprah was famously raised in poverty in Mississippi before she became the queen of day time talk and just about everything else.  President Obama continuously touted his credentials as an American Dream president, the son of a Kenyan and a Kansan during his historic 2008 presidential campaign.  Using his unusual past to his advantage, he continuously said on the trail, “In no other country on earth is my story even possible.”

The Dream mentality is so all-encompassing that it can be found almost anywhere.  Some of our great American art personifies the Dream.  Citizen Kane and The Godfather II, two of our greatest films portray rags to riches stories.  Recently, the Will Smith film The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) showed some of the heart-breaking realities of chasing success.  In one moving scene, Smith and his son find themselves homeless and spend the night in the public restroom of a Bay Area Rapid Transit station.  Another scene from this film epitomizes the Dream mentality.  Smith’s character teaches his son that the Dream is a possibility for those who work for it.

You got a dream… You gotta protect it. People can’t do somethin’ themselves, they wanna tell you you can’t do it. If you want somethin’, go get it. Period.

Will Smith’s character endures barrier after barrier to achieving success but it is this belief in the Dream that propels him forward.  This spirit of opportunity and drive is necessary in working toward the Dream.  Without it, the goal seems unachievable.

However, that same drive can turn against those who devote their lives to it.  F. Scott Fitzgerald’s acclaimed work, The Great Gatsby is also about the American Dream and the potential pitfalls of too much success.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Excess is not a concept included in the Dream. Rather, the Dream is to have enough to be comfortable and give your children a little better than you had.  Enormous wealth is a bastardization of the Dream, an unintended consequence of unbridled ambition.

Dream stories serve to inform us of possibility.  Last year we heard an American Dream story recounted over and over, that of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.  An e-mail from President Obama to his supporters recounts the now familiar story.

And then there is Judge Sotomayor’s incredible personal story. She grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx — her parents coming to New York from Puerto Rico during the Second World War. At the age of nine, she lost her father, and her mother worked six days a week just to put food on the table. It takes a certain resilience and determination to rise up out of such circumstances, focus, work hard and achieve the American dream.

In Judge Sotomayor, our nation will have a Justice who will never forget her humble beginnings, will always apply the rule of law, and will be a protector of the Constitution that made her American dream and the dreams of millions of others possible. As she said so clearly yesterday, Judge Sotomayor’s decisions on the bench “have been made not to serve the interests of any one litigant, but always to serve the larger interest of impartial justice.”

This story shows who can achieve the American Dream: anyone.  According to the Dream, we all have the opportunity to achieve it.  Our own hard work and moral fiber will help us along the way.  As Americans, this story is our story and permeates every aspect of our society.  We are constantly told that we can achieve it.

But, is that true?  For some, pursuit of a Dream turns into the American Nightmare, faced with the inability to break into a closed system no matter how hard they work.  The ideology of the American Dream has been used to justify the inequalities of our society, as if those who have not been able to get ahead do not deserve it and have not worked hard enough.  This is where the tension between meritocracy and inheritance becomes important.  For the argument that those who get ahead deserve success to be logically sound, everyone would have to originate in the exact same place.  But, we don’t.  Those with privilege start out light years closer to the finish line.  The next installment of this series will examine the barriers and impediments to achieving the American Dream.

When It Hits Home: follow-up and the future

Last Wednesday, February 24th, 150 people attended When It Hits Home: an evening concerning intimate partner violence.  The event, sponsored by The Xenia Institute, the Center for Social Justice, and the OU Women’s and Gender Studies program, pre-screened One in Three, a film on domestic violence created by local Oklahoma filmmakers.  After the film, dialogue fellows from Xenia facilitated a public dialogue designed to create lists of ideas and topics for future discussion and action.  The various lists were assembled into a single document that was then sent to the event attendees.  It is our hope that the attendees will continue working with this issue alongside our work.  The list can be seen here:

When It Hits Home: ideas through dialogue

Additionally, three podcasts were produced leading up to the event.  One podcast was a conversation with the filmmakers of One in Three, another was a conversation with an OU law professor and former domestic violence prosecutor, and the final one was made up of highlights from the first Xenia/WGS joint event on domestic violence, held in April 2009.

Gabe and Leguiera podcast

Connie Smothermon podcast

Don’t Look Away podcast

Click here for a gallery of photos from the event:

When It Hits Home photo gallery

A Ringing Critique.

News and analysis…

Now that the glamor of the 2010 Olympics is over it is interesting to observe the various social questions left in its wake. Some issues which were shelved to make room for international harmony and sportsmanship include gender identity, sexism, racism, homelessness, indigenous rights, etc. Here are some such stories which have been largely overlooked in the rush to count medals and support national pride…

Global Comment |Taraneh Ghajar Jerven’s recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, “2010 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony: What about Vancouver’s homeless?” highlights the injustices perpetrated in the run-up to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics.(1) Jerven discusses the expensive development costs associated with the 2010 Olympic Games, where the original budget of $660 million was revised to over $5 billion.(2)

The astronomical increase in costs for the Vancouver Olympics is especially egregious when considering that the city’s homeless population has doubled since 2003 – the same year that the city secured its Olympic bid. This rise in homelessness leaves one wondering: how can an international event that claims to celebrate peace, unity and global harmony so callously ignore the needs of the most vulnerable populations? What kind of priorities is the international community embracing in such an outright rejection of the human right to housing?

Violations of the human right to housing are not specific to the 2010 Vancouver Games, and are unfortunately indicative of a growing trend in these types of mega-sporting events. One key example is the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where violations of the human right to housing displaced approximately 1.5 million residents. This trend can be followed to other host cities, such as Seoul, where 720,000 people were displaced to make way for the 1988 Olympic Games. Additionally here in the United States, in the run-up to the 1996 Atlanta Games, 30,000 people were displaced and 2,000 units of public housing were destroyed.(3)

Womanist Musings | In an interview with Salon, three time world medal champion Elvis Stojko, made clear that the greatest danger to figure skating is the feminization of male skaters.

It basically started about one year ago, when Skate Canada said that they weren’t getting enough young boys enrolling in skating. People tiptoe around the topic, and I was like, “You know, I’m just going to say it: Effeminate men’s skating is not my style of skating. In men’s skating I like to see power and strength.”

Effeminate men’s skating is the issue with male figure skating. WOW…Of course Elvis believes that it is only right for people to get upset if they are called gay.

“Some guys get into the sport because it’s difficult — the spins, the speed — and they like to showcase that within the music. When you’re not appreciated for that, it takes its toll. And then when people call them effeminate, they get pissed. People call them gay, and some people don’t like to be called that.”

If you want to open up figure skating to another audience, you need to create something that’s going to allow everyone to watch. If you have a male masculine person watching it, they need something to relate to. Other guys relate to Johnny Weir’s thing. You need to have guys doing jumps, so a person who also watches NASCAR can identify with it and say, “Hey that’s awesome — how many rotations is that?” or “How fast did he spin?” instead of, “How pretty was that guy?”

Being called gay can only be a bad thing if you have a problem with homosexuality to begin with. Why should it be considered threatening to anyone’s masculinity? He makes it sound as though gay men are destroying the sport by not being suitably butch. Don’t even bother to get upset about his commentary because gay people need to just accept their second class status, according to Elvis.

Global Comment | Native leaders like Fontaine have been very vocal about the opportunities that the Olympics offers First Nations citizens. However, there are many within the aboriginal community that raise the concern that the Olympics amount to further exploitation of Native peoples.

“The Four Host Nations is a corporate body made up primarily of government-funded Indian Act band council chiefs, not hereditary chieftainships,” says Seislom, a Lil’wat Elder. “An overwhelming number of Indigenous people in these territories and in the interior are opposed to the Olympics because of the long-term impact including destruction of the land, commodification of Native art and culture, and the creation of long-term poverty once the few token jobs are gone.”

According to the Olympic resistance network, during the Olympic Torch relay, protesters in over thirty cities, towns, and Indigenous communities successfully disrupted the Torch Relay, forcing delays and route cancellations, with at least thirteen arrests. Much of the Canadian coverage regarding the protests does not seek to discuss why the protesters are attempting to disrupt the games. The protesters are seen as rabble rousers who are destroying our chance to showcase Canadian wonders.

Even as the torch was carried along the Highway of Tears (a stretch of highway 12 between Prince George and Prince Rupert, B.C., where numerous women who are largely Indigenous have gone missing) many Canadians are unaware of their government’s failure to bring a halt to the violence. It is unimaginable that disappearances of White women would have been met with such apathy.

Leader-Post |The IOC held a symposium in Miami in January to “attempt to identify the most up-to-date medical/biological science with regard to the gender issue that may be of relevance to sport and that will help sports bodies to deal with potential cases.”

“Gender issue” can mean just about anything, which is why the IOC uses the phrase. Scientists at the Florida International University met with the IOC and the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) in conjunction with the 2nd World Conference on Hormonal and Genetic Basis of Sexual Differentiation Disorders. The IOC is most worried about a condition referred to as “Disorders of Sexual Development.”

In the eyes of the IOC, and obviously those in the medical world who dream up names for conditions that place people outside conventional sexuality, not being biologically absolutely a man or absolutely a woman is seen as a disorder. IOC officials say their concern is about fairness, as women who have one of the DSDs (once called intersexed, which makes more sense) may have a biological advantage over women who don’t have DSD characteristics.

This is indeed a murky area as all athletes at the Olympic level have genetic advantages of different kinds. All Olympic athletes train very hard, and are committed to their dream, whatever that may be, but to make a national team certain “gifts” have to be in place biologically. Endurance athletes will go nowhere without very high “MaxVO2s” and anaerobic thresholds. You can increase both through training to some extent, but if you are not born with the genetic information that allows your body to deliver great amounts of oxygen per kilogram of weight and then allows your body to “work” for long periods of time at a level that is not far below your maximum heartrate, you aren’t going to the Olympics in the endurance events. The only sprinters who make it to the 100-metre final have a different profile, but they too need to be genetically gifted as do gymnasts, as do tennis players, and so on.

In this highly gendered world one person’s genetic gift is another person’s disorder. Where is the line in the sand for what an athlete brings to the startline courtesy of Mother Nature? The IOC does not recommend to Kenyan long-distance runners or Norwegian cross-country skiers that they get an operation to reduce their super-high MaxVO2s because they have an unfair advantage, but this is what they tell intersexed or DSD athletes to do about their sexuality.

Mother Jones | There are two reasons why Alissa Johnson, a 22-year-old Park City, Utah, native, knows she should be in Vancouver today. First, to support her brother Anders, who is ski jumping for the US Olympic team. And second, to strap on her 8-foot-long skis and compete herself. She’s one of the US’s top five female ski jumpers. If there were a women’s team, she’d be on it.

But there isn’t. So, because ski jumping is the last remaining sport of the Olympics that bars women from competing, Johnson is going as a sister and a friend. And that’s it.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) says the women’s exclusion isn’t discrimination. President Jacques Rogge has insisted that the decision “was made strictly on a technical basis, and absolutely not on gender grounds.” But female would-be Olympic competitors say they don’t understand what that “technical basis” is. Their abilities? They point to American Lindsey Van, who holds the world record for the single longest jump by anyone, male or female. (Ironically, she broke the record flying from a jump built at Whistler for the Vancouver Olympics). Their numbers? When the IOC voted in 2006 not to add women’s ski jumping, 83 competitors from 14 nations jumped at the top level, less universality than required to add a new event. But in the same year, women’s skier cross claimed just 30 skiers from 11 nations. The committee added it. (There are also too few male ski jumpers to qualify, but as one of the original 16 Winter Olympic events, their event isn’t subjected to the same rules.)

Best of the web…

Iraq Holds Early Voting Amid Blasts  |  Aljazeera English

Al Jazeera’s Mike Hanna, reporting from Baghdad, said the vote is seen as a pivotal moment in Iraq as the US prepares to withdraw large numbers of troops by 2011.

“This is a very significant vote; it is the closest to a truly representative process since the US-led invasion [in 2003],” he said.

More than 6,000 candidates will be competing for 325 seats in the election.

Travel around the country has been restricted and the authorities have cancelled all leave for security services.

The election winners will oversee the withdrawal of US forces from the country and help determine whether Iraq will be able to move past the deep Sunni-Shia divisions that almost destroyed it.

Five years ago, Iraq’s Sunni Arabs boycotted the legislative election,allowing Shia and Kurdish parties to take control of parliament, but Sunnis are now expected to take part in large numbers.

Lesbians in South Africa Being Raped to ‘Cure’ Them of Sexual Orientation  |  Alternet

The group ActionAid released a report about the shocking rise in homophobic attacks and murders in South Africa, especially Johannesburg and Cape Town where lesbian women are being raped as a “corrective” punishment for being gay.

They report:

Rape is fast becoming the most widespread hate crime targeted against gay women in townships across South Africa. One lesbian and gay support group says it is dealing with 10 new cases of lesbian women being targeted for ‘corrective’ rape every week in Cape Town alone.

‘Terrifying’ Saudi Novel Wins Arabic Booker  |  CNN

Saudi novelist Abdo Khal, who won the Arabic Booker prize for his novel depicting the ravaging effects of unlimited wealth, says he writes about the “double standards in our life.”

Khal won the prestigious $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his novel, “Spewing Sparks as Big as Castles.”

The book, whose title is a Koranic reference to hell, chronicles the seductive powers of an ultra-wealthy palace, telling “the agonising story of those who have become enslaved by it, drawn by its promise of glamour,” said the organizers of the prize.

Iran Document: Women Activists Write Mousavi & Karroubi  |  Enduring America

A letter from Iran’s women activists to Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, written last week, published by Rah-e-Sabz, and passed on by Mission Free Iran:

As you know, during the 10th presidential campaign, you made promises about the obvious rights of Iranian women, which, during the course of the past 30 years have been totally ignored. Although these promises comprise only a small part of Iranian women’s just demands, during the post-election events, even those little promises disappeared from your announcements and interviews regarding your intention to pursue peoples’ rightful demands. This has happened while women and girls of this land have had a distinguished role in the green movement in pursuing the plundered rights of the Iranian people, have been in the front line of the green movement equal to men, and even have paid and are paying a higher price.

Pondering Dialogue…

Seeing as you, my readers, are checking out a dialogue organization website I can only guess you share my interest in this particular issue. Working from this shared interest, I want to ponder on what it means to dialogue with others in a meaningful way, and  how dialogue is being promoted and carried out, (particularly interfaith dialogue).

These last few days I have attended a serious of lectures by religious scholar Stephanie Saldana, author of the lovely book “The Bread of Angels”, and active proponent of religious dialogue.  When retelling her  experiences as a Christian woman in the Middle East and her deep appreciation of Islam, Saldana made an observation about the nature of dialogue, “Dialogue is like marriage counseling…”. That it is only after you have built a deep relationship with someone over time that you can truly engage in dialogue where you bring up issue that you deeply struggle over and disagree upon instead of sticking to your comfort zones of similarities.

I found it interesting to compare this conception of dialogue to those put forth by Xenia members in the “What is Dialogue” video series, (which can be found here). For myself,  dialogue is not dependent on time. It is possible to know someone for years without ever having had a deep exchange just as it is possible to meet someone once and have a life changing experience with them. Indeed one of my own such experiences was an evening-long conversation at a local cafe with a elderly gentleman from West Texas. While we came from very different backgrounds and belief systems, we were able to see each other as human, sit down, and struggle together over issues which often send people into screaming matches. It is this seeing each other as human which I feel lies at the very heart of dialogue. While it often takes time to see others in such a way sometimes, it is an immediate realization which shocks one to the core.

However, instead of focusing solely on what it means to be in dialogue with others, a topic which I feel has been well covered by others within the Xenia Institute,  I instead wish to turn our attention to the ways we try to promote dialogue and organize “dialogue events”.

During her visit Saldana offered a critique, which inspired this blog, on the way major dialogue events are often conducted. As she explains from her own experiences, formal dialogue events are generally structured as a panel or meetings where the speakers, who have never met before, talk about issue of unity. The problem is that the panelists often do not end up engaging over the issues, rather they attempt to answer the questions from their tradition’s official stance instead of interacting with each other. Moreover they are put into the position trying to represent an entire tradition when they are just one person. Finally, as such events generally invite an “official” representative of a religion  instead of average practitioners, it is often the case  that women and members of submovements are left out of these formal dialogue opportunities.

For the most part I would agree with this critique. From my own experiences with interfaith dialogue events (and their political equivalent: the “bi-partisan discussion”) there is often a frustrating lack of deep engagement going on. Rather people tend to talk to each other instead of with each other. Moreover, at such events I often feel as though people focus more on discussing dialogue and why it is important rather than actually engaging in it. I don’t necessarily believe this lessens the value of such events, just that they accomplish a different level of conversation, which is still  important for encouraging future discussion. If personal dialogue is like marriage counseling which takes place after deep acquaintance, than dialogue panels are like the awkward first date which might lead to more promising things.

Still I feel that we need to start considering different models for “dialogue events” and new ways of facilitating dialogue within communities, for example, during formal events trying to focus on individuals as being part of their tradition rather than as being representatives of said tradition. One might also structure dialogue events to meet over an extended time in more personal settings, (such as Xenia does with its dialogue groups). Finally, for dialogue to occur there must be respect toward the other: a seeing them as they are rather than what you assume… But this does not mean dialogue must be harmonious or even particularly friendly at times. Perhaps groups might try to go beyond the unifying aspects of dialogue often employed to keep people polite and let members emphasize their difference even if it is challenging to others.

These are issues with which I have been struggling for some time as I work with what I hope to accomplish and learn by becoming involved in the dialogue movement. I feel it is important to occasionally take a step back and look at expectations, methods, and assumptions of  “encouraging dialogue” so as to understand how we have affected the world, to see what we need to do to remain true to the spirit of dialogue rather than being caught up in its ideals.

Xenia Institute completes video series, “What is Dialogue?”

In the past three years, many people have asked us the same question: what is dialogue?  Next come questions about specific meanings for the word “dialogue” and the way we use it at Xenia.  We also get several questions a week concerning our vision for the future: transformation through dialogue.  Since these topics are constantly in our hearts and minds, we decided to produce a series of short videos on this subject.

We proudly submit these four videos for the first time in one place.  Enjoy them as you contemplate the question with us: what is dialogue?

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Last video on Dialogue released today…

Today we publish our last segment of the series called, “What is Dialogue?”  This four part series was produced with help from Xenia dialogue fellows, volunteers, community leaders, and Dr. Tom Boyd, the keynote speaker at our fourth annual Sam Matthews Social Justice Award Banquet.

Please enjoy, and stay tuned as we continue to explore dialogue in various ways at The Xenia Institute.

Third Podcast Highlights “Don’t Look Away,” the event that started it all

Today we offer part 3 in our podcast series concerning domestic violence.  Part 3 is a collection of highlights from Don’t Look Away: violence against women and human rights in Oklahoma.  This event was held last April as a collaboration between The Xenia Institute and the OU Women’s and Gender Studies program.  This first collaboration created many friendships between the two entities and started a conversation on domestic violence issues that will continue for some time.

As we prepare for tonight’s event, When It Hits Home: an evening concerning intimate partner violence, we found we should take a look back at the event that started it all.

Don’t Look Away podcast

Xenia releases first in a series of podcasts on One in Three

Today we introduce the first in a compelling series of audio interviews surrounding “When It Hits Home: An Evening Concerning Intimate Partner Violence.”

This interview is a conversation with Lagueria Davis and Gabe Miller, director and producer of One In Three, the film that will be pre-screened in Xenia’s joint event later this week.  To listen, click on the link.  To download this interview for further listening, simply right click on the link and choose “save as.”

Gabe and Lagueria podcast

What is Terrorism?

Analysis …

Last week, software engineer Joseph Stack flew a small airplane into a building in Austin, Texas, that contained offices for the Internal Revenue Service. Authorities say Stack, who according to an online letter he published before he crashed the plane into the building, had a grudge against the IRS. The deadly attack has prompted discussion over whether Stack’s act was an act of terrorism or that of a single, enraged individual, whether the reluctance to call the attack terrorism may be related to the ways in which we divide the world between Us and Them, and how we define “Them.”

Crooks and Liars |  “Fox News’ anchors seemed eager to assure viewers today that the plane-crash attack on IRS offices in Austin this morning was not an act of domestic terrorism. … this is true only if the conventional understanding of the word “terrorism” has now been narrowed down to mean only international terrorism and to preclude domestic terrorism altogether. Since when, after all, is attempting to blow up a federal office as a protest against federal policies NOT an act of domestic terrorism?”

Glenn Greenwald @Salon |  “All of this underscores, yet again, that Terrorism is simultaneously the single most meaningless and most manipulated word in the American political lexicon.  The term now has virtually nothing to do with the act itself and everything to do with the identity of the actor, especially his or her religious identity.  It has really come to mean:  “a Muslim who fights against or even expresses hostility towards the United States, Israel and their allies.”  That’s why all of this confusion and doubt arose yesterday over whether a person who perpetrated a classic act of Terrorism should, in fact, be called a Terrorist:  he’s not a Muslim and isn’t acting on behalf of standard Muslim grievances against the U.S. or Israel, and thus does not fit the “definition.”  One might concede that perhaps there’s some technical sense in which term might apply to Stack, but as Fox News emphasized:  it’s not “terrorism in the larger sense that most of us are used to . . . terrorism in that capital T way.”  We all know who commits terrorism in “that capital T way,” and it’s not people named Joseph Stack.”

Racism Review |  “In my view, this is a good time for much careful reflection and action about the underlying, stressful, oppressive class, racial, gender conditions of this society. For example, the society’s structural conditions, mentioned in the suicide note, that sometimes play a role in driving people of any background to such extreme violence are also rarely examined in the mainstream media. One can and should examine these contextual conditions of suicide attackers closely without excusing such violence. They often tell us something about our societies. Clearly, the economic depression we are now in is likely part of his story. So, it seems to me, is the violent rhetoric of many in the “tea bag” movement and on white supremacist websites. This extremely violent talk and discussion probably makes violence seem “normal” to people like this suicide attacker. Why is there no mainstream media discussion of the broader racial and class and gender implications of this story, and the biased ways it is being handled?”

Matthew Yglesias @Think Progress |  “Stack’s stated purpose for undertaking the attack was to try to prompt a counterproductive overreaction: “I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are.” It’s smart, then, that as a country we’re responding to his terrorism by trying to avoid counterproductive overreactions. But of course this is also Osama bin Laden’s goal and it’s also appropriate to respond to Islamist political violence in a similar spirit. We shouldn’t be indifferent to the risk of death by Islamist terrorism any more than we should be indifferent to America’s unusually high rate of non-political homicides or to America’s alarmingly high infant mortality rate or its large number of deaths in car crashes. But it’s important to try to think about all these problems in a rational spirit, and adopt reasonable policy responses.”

The New Yorker |  “Does a foreign passport make you a terrorist? That might mean that there was no such thing as domestic terrorism. What about an American working for Al Qaeda, or a foreigner who has a problem with the I.R.S., or with the Pentagon, or with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission? Capture abroad? What if Osama bin Laden, as unlikely as it sounds, were apprehended in New York? Conversely, what about all the criminals who are apprehended in other countries, and then extradited here? And what about so-called home-grown jihadis? If a plane is flown deliberately into a building and you don’t know what the pilot was thinking or what nationality he had, did a crime or a terrorist act take place?”

Best of the Web …

The Best Journalism of 2009  |  TrueSlant

Throughout 2009, I kept a running list of the best journalism I encountered. Although I endeavored to remain as impartial as possible, note that I’ve been an employee of The Atlantic, that I’d eagerly write for numerous publications that received awards, that I have too many friends/acquaintances/professional contacts in journalism to disclose them all, and that the number of pieces I miss every year far exceeds the number I’m able to read.

In other words, this isn’t an infallible account of journalism’s best, but I aim to make it the best roundup that any one person can offer, one of these years I intend to do better than the committees who pick the Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards (the pressure’s on, especially since you guys charge entry fees), and if nothing else my effort encompasses writing that is well worth your time.

Sanaa, Yemen to Become World’s First Capital City to Run Out of Water  |  AlterNet

A Yemeni water trader profiled in a recent Reuters investigation explains that even though his well is 1,300 ft deep, he’s hardly extracting any water at all. The same goes for wells that are 2,000 and even 3,000 ft deep–in Yemen’s mountainous capital city Sanaa, more water is being consumed than produced. Families have reported going without getting access to water for weeks. Sanaa is home to 2 million people, and is growing fast–but experts say that if trends continue, it could be a ghost town in 20 years.

Kevin Smith & Southwest: The Tip of the Fat-Shaming Iceberg  |  Global Comment

Overall, though, fat-shaming is everywhere we turn. It happens in the erasure of fat bodies from the media. Women who are average weight are routinely photo-shopped to appear slimmer. Fat people earn less than skinny people, even though there is no substantial evidence that they are less competent. Doctors routinely ignore the medical complaints of fat people and assume that every illness or complaint is weight-related, even when the patient and medical evidence indicate otherwise.

We have been socialized to believe that fat is always the problem. If you cannot get a boyfriend, the answer is to lose weight. If you want to be successful in life, lose weight. The answer is always “lose weight.”

How to Expose the Corrupt  |  TEDTalks

Some of the world’s most baffling social problems, says Peter Eigen, can be traced to systematic, pervasive government corruption, hand-in-glove with global companies. At TEDxBerlin, Eigen describes the thrilling counter-attack led by his organization Transparency International.

Rev. Chris Moore’s opening prayer from the 5th annual Matthews Banquet

I always get a little nervous when preparations for our annual Matthews Banquet come around.  There are so many intricate details to be worked out, and many of them have to come in sequence.  For example, we can’t book the caterer or the flowers until we know how many people we’re expecting.  We can’t know how many people we’re expecting until we have sent out invitations.  And we can’t send out invitations until we have selected our award recipient.  I actually think there’s a line on my Matthews master checklist that says, “worry about absolutely everything until you can’t eat or sleep.”  My friends tease me about this last one because everything always turns out just fine, whether I worry or not.

At any rate, one thing I never have to worry about for very long is the lineup of speakers we get for our banquets.  We have been very fortunate in the last five years to have some of the best speakers in the area assist us in honoring our recipients, and this year we were particularly lucky.  Xenia dialogue fellow and local pastor Rev. Chris Moore offered our opening blessing, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.  It’s exactly the kind of charge I needed at that moment (I don’t mean a “charge” like the one you get drinking an energy drink, but charge as in “charged with a responsibility” or an assignment or challenge).

I offer you the opportunity to share in this charge, and I submit Rev. Moore’s prayer for your review:

Gracious God,

Open us up this evening. Awaken us to a new dawn.

Remind us again that you are the god who seeks not our offerings or sacrifices but seeks that we care for the orphan and widow, for the powerless and marginalized.

You are the god whose law is written on our hearts.

Create in us a new awareness. Birth in us a sense of our own power that we might act where we live and be your hands and feet in the world. Reign in our pride, temper our egos, and tame our wild individualism so that we might live out of your spirit of justice, peace, and creation in a world which does not hunger for more absolute certainty or judgement, but is starving for a little compassion.

Too often we think your work comes only in the big things, that we must change the world in a day if we are leading meaningful lives. Too often we only think of the glorious moments, we remember a speech on the steps of the capital in Washington D.C. that evoked a new dream of equality and still sends chills down our spines without also remembering of the marches yet to be walked, the sting of fire hoses yet to be felt, or the beatings and hatred yet to be endured.

We remember the names celebrated by the fleeting winds of fame, but have never know the names of people who just stood their ground, or signed their name, or simply did the right thing when the time was upon them. Remind us that your way doesn’t come in glorious light or shining spectacle. What you ask of us isn’t the spotlight or the 15 minutes. You seek our hearts and minds, you seek our dedication, you seek our souls.

As we prepare to share a meal together let us do so remembering all of those people who have produced it, from the farmers to the drivers, to the handlers to the cooks and servers. May this food nourish our bodies and may our fellowship feed our spirits. And as we gather together to celebrate one among us who has made a difference, let us remember that we can all make a difference with every day, every encounter, every decision. There are no small things to you.

Free us from the temptation of apathy or fame and set us on the same path of all of those nameless ones who have changed this world. Those who held no grand vision or elaborate plan, but who saw pain and healed it, who felt misery and responded to it, who witnessed suffering and addressed it.

Let us be present now, in this moment and beyond to a world in the need of the witness of the power of faithful love and unconditional grace. Let us, as your servant Ghandi once said, “be the change we wish to see in the world”.

Amen.

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