ECFS Received your Submission/Request at Mon Jul 9 14:54:42 EDT 2007
Eastern Time.
Your filing will be available for viewing online one (1) business day after the receipt of this confirmation. Filers are encouraged to retrieve and view their filing by going to http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/ecfs and clicking on the "Search for Filed Comments" link.
My Comment:
the final frontier for full information supression
Net Neutrality is essential to free speech, equal opportunity and economic innovation in America. Since the FCC removed this basic protection in 2005, the top executives of phone and cable companies have stated their intention to become the Internet's gatekeepers and to discriminate against Web sites that don't pay their added tolls.
This fundamental change would end the open Internet as we know it. It would damage my ability to connect with others, share information and participate in our 21st century democracy and economy. The FCC must ensure that broadband providers do not block, interfere with or discriminate against any lawful Internet traffic based on its ownership, source or destination.
Now it's your turn...
Showing posts with label activism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label activism. Show all posts
Monday, July 09, 2007
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
watchword: decentralization
The only hope I see in the world is in small decentralized problem solvers who do their thing away from corrupt governments and power structures.
Coincidentally here is a book about just such a concept(link).
Power to the people.
Thanks for the pointer, Bioneers.
Along the same lines, today I am investing in a local farmer.
I'm buying a share in a local, organic CSA.
Friday, March 23, 2007
dear gang
"If your baby has a fever you take her to the doctor.
When the doctor says 'You need to intervene here', you don't say 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me its not a problem.'
If the baby's crib is on fire, you don't stand around speculating that the baby is fire retardant.
You take action.
The planet has a fever."
Vice President Albert Gore, testifying before Congress, 3-21-07
I want to mention here the thing I was trying to tell my little gang the other night, but folks were still wrapped up in last year's movie.
The global warming denyers are gathering strength, they have the airwaves (I heard Rush Limberger poohpoohing global warming on WJR, the strongest radio signal in Michigan, and remember, the most solid block of Bush supporters (deluded voters) are regular viewers of FOX News), and they are churning out skepticism about the seriousness of the global warming crisis.Much like the tobacco industry did when they were faced with facts.
The global warming denyers in the right wingnut Christian fundie movement, and the GOP are spreading around an English movie that counters 'An Inconvenient Truth'.
I've seen it, you can too. It's easy to find online.
It is very convincing if you aren't a serious thinker and are happy to be reassured that whatever you do is 'just fine, dear'.
But if you want to hear a fact by fact rebuttal to the GOP movie, Thom Hartmann had an EXCELLENT interview with Ross Gelbspan on March 20.
If you want to talk to global warming skeptics and be prepared for answering their points, factually, then find the clip and listen to it. Get it on White Rose in the archives, or maybe Itunes still has it.
Sheryl Crow
When the doctor says 'You need to intervene here', you don't say 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me its not a problem.'
If the baby's crib is on fire, you don't stand around speculating that the baby is fire retardant.
You take action.
The planet has a fever."
Vice President Albert Gore, testifying before Congress, 3-21-07
I want to mention here the thing I was trying to tell my little gang the other night, but folks were still wrapped up in last year's movie.
The global warming denyers are gathering strength, they have the airwaves (I heard Rush Limberger poohpoohing global warming on WJR, the strongest radio signal in Michigan, and remember, the most solid block of Bush supporters (deluded voters) are regular viewers of FOX News), and they are churning out skepticism about the seriousness of the global warming crisis.Much like the tobacco industry did when they were faced with facts.
The global warming denyers in the right wingnut Christian fundie movement, and the GOP are spreading around an English movie that counters 'An Inconvenient Truth'.
I've seen it, you can too. It's easy to find online.
It is very convincing if you aren't a serious thinker and are happy to be reassured that whatever you do is 'just fine, dear'.
But if you want to hear a fact by fact rebuttal to the GOP movie, Thom Hartmann had an EXCELLENT interview with Ross Gelbspan on March 20.
If you want to talk to global warming skeptics and be prepared for answering their points, factually, then find the clip and listen to it. Get it on White Rose in the archives, or maybe Itunes still has it.
Sheryl Crow
Monday, February 05, 2007
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Friday, January 26, 2007
Rush Holt sponsors voter confidence act
Last November, voting machine errors stymied elections across the country including over 18,000 lost votes in Florida! We need our representatives to restore our confidence in America's electoral process.
Representative Rush Holt is about to introduce the Voter Confidence Act, which would go a long way in making our voting machines secure and accurate. But its success depends on the support it wins from other lawmakers this month.
Click here now to send a message asking your representative to co-sponsor Congressman Holt's Voter Confidence Act:
http://www.GetItStraightBy2008.org/CosponsorHoltBill
The new Congress has already begun work on a number of vital issues, like new ethics rules and an increase in the minimum wage. But we need to make sure that they make voting reform a priority.
Common Cause is supporting this critical bill. I have done my part by writing my representative. I hope you'll join me.
Tell your representative to co-sponsor Congressman Holt's Voter Confidence Act.
Representative Rush Holt is about to introduce the Voter Confidence Act, which would go a long way in making our voting machines secure and accurate. But its success depends on the support it wins from other lawmakers this month.
Click here now to send a message asking your representative to co-sponsor Congressman Holt's Voter Confidence Act:
http://www.GetItStraightBy2008.org/CosponsorHoltBill
The new Congress has already begun work on a number of vital issues, like new ethics rules and an increase in the minimum wage. But we need to make sure that they make voting reform a priority.
Common Cause is supporting this critical bill. I have done my part by writing my representative. I hope you'll join me.
Tell your representative to co-sponsor Congressman Holt's Voter Confidence Act.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Good Luck to All the Fine Demonstrators this weekend
"A time comes when silence is betrayal. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought, within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world."
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Rude, but Punditiness
I read the writings of the Rude Pundit for some humor, some relief, and some very good points.
1/15/2007
Why Martin Luther King Would Fuck Bush's Shit Up (2007 Edition):
Because of this, from the New York Times, December 2, 1965, on the House Un-American Activities Committee:
"If they continue to investigate the civil rights movement, it can mobilize the kind of opposition to the committee which can well mean the end of it."
And because of this, from a March 1967 interview with that paper, on the Vietnam War:
"First, I feel this war is playing havoc with our domestic destinies. As long as the war in Vietnam goes on, the more difficult it will be to implement the programs that will deal with the economic and social programs that Negro people confront in our country and poor people generally.
"So in a real sense, the Great Society has been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam...
"There is another reason why I feel compelled at this time to take a stand against the war and that is that the constant escalation of the war in Vietnam can lead to a grand war with China and to a kind of full world war that could mean the annihilation of the human race...
"We are the greatest military power and we don't need to prove our military power. I think we are superbly well-placed, equipped to take the initiative in this and create the atmosphere for negotiations by ceasing bombings and some of the other things we are doing. Now if our nation insists on escalating the war and if we don't see any changes, it may be necessary to engage in civil disobedience to further arouse the conscience of the nation and make it clear we feel this is hurting our country.
"And I might say this is another basic reason why I am involved and concerned. It is because I love America. I am not engaged in a hate America campaign. I would hope that the people of this country standing up against the war are standing up against it because they love America and because they want to see our great nation really stand up as the moral example of the world.
"The fact is we have alienated ourselves from so much of the world and have become morally and politically isolated as the result of our involvement in the war in Vietnam."
Martin Luther King would fuck Bush's shit up because he reverses Bush's notion of what the moral equation is in war. Morality avoiding war. Morality is ending war. Moral authority can never be gained by the gun or the bomb or the electric shock.
And because he knew that truly loving your nation means being able to say it is wrong.
1/15/2007
Why Martin Luther King Would Fuck Bush's Shit Up (2007 Edition):
Because of this, from the New York Times, December 2, 1965, on the House Un-American Activities Committee:
"If they continue to investigate the civil rights movement, it can mobilize the kind of opposition to the committee which can well mean the end of it."
And because of this, from a March 1967 interview with that paper, on the Vietnam War:
"First, I feel this war is playing havoc with our domestic destinies. As long as the war in Vietnam goes on, the more difficult it will be to implement the programs that will deal with the economic and social programs that Negro people confront in our country and poor people generally.
"So in a real sense, the Great Society has been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam...
"There is another reason why I feel compelled at this time to take a stand against the war and that is that the constant escalation of the war in Vietnam can lead to a grand war with China and to a kind of full world war that could mean the annihilation of the human race...
"We are the greatest military power and we don't need to prove our military power. I think we are superbly well-placed, equipped to take the initiative in this and create the atmosphere for negotiations by ceasing bombings and some of the other things we are doing. Now if our nation insists on escalating the war and if we don't see any changes, it may be necessary to engage in civil disobedience to further arouse the conscience of the nation and make it clear we feel this is hurting our country.
"And I might say this is another basic reason why I am involved and concerned. It is because I love America. I am not engaged in a hate America campaign. I would hope that the people of this country standing up against the war are standing up against it because they love America and because they want to see our great nation really stand up as the moral example of the world.
"The fact is we have alienated ourselves from so much of the world and have become morally and politically isolated as the result of our involvement in the war in Vietnam."
Martin Luther King would fuck Bush's shit up because he reverses Bush's notion of what the moral equation is in war. Morality avoiding war. Morality is ending war. Moral authority can never be gained by the gun or the bomb or the electric shock.
And because he knew that truly loving your nation means being able to say it is wrong.
Monday, January 15, 2007
The third monster MLK identified, militarism, is keeping us from our rightful future
There will be a day of protest against the war on January 27 in D.C.
From Dr. King, a Reminder on Iraq
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom the nation will honor on Monday, took to the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City at a meeting organized by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The date was April 4, 1967, one year before his assassination in Memphis.
King said he was in New York because his conscience had left him no choice. In his speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," King declared: "That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam."
King acknowledged the reluctance of some people to speak out on Vietnam -- the same hesitation some Americans may have today over voicing their concerns about Iraq. People, he explained, "do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war."
But King concluded that too much was at stake. He and the other religious and lay leaders were moved by what the conflict in Vietnam was doing to the United States. Vietnam, King said, was consuming American troops and money like "some demonic, destructive suction tube" even as that war was laying waste to the Vietnamese people and to America's standing in the world.
And on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in 2007?
More than 3,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq, while 22,000 others have been wounded. Billions of dollars that could have been invested here at home have been spent there, a lot of it wasted, some of it stolen, plenty of it unaccounted for. And Iraqis in Baghdad, who cowered for decades under a brutal dictator, have been living in the midst of violence almost continuously since Saddam Hussein was deposed.
"We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them" read a bumper sticker in Washington this week.
Now enter George W. Bush -- the president who got America into this debacle through a series of misjudgments that would make Alfred E. Neuman look brilliant. This week Bush announced plans to plop down thousands of additional troops in the middle of a sectarian war and to shell out billions of additional dollars to pacify a war-weary Iraqi population that, truth be told, wants America gone.
Why trust this administration?
Contrary to what Bush and his allies said:
· There were no weapons of mass destruction poised to strike America and her allies.
· A quick defeat of Hussein did not lead to chocolates and flowers in the streets of Baghdad.
· An American invasion did not produce a unified, nonsectarian and Western-oriented Iraq or spark a desire for U.S.-style governance throughout the Arab world.
· De-Baathification and the imposition of a market economy at gunpoint did not usher in a period of tranquility or the flowering of capitalism.
The Bush administration struck first because it had the power to strike and the arrogance to think, foolishly, that it could win and dominate the conquered on the cheap.
King spoke in '67 about "the Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them." Witness the Bush team in Iraq.
Today they have a bloodbath on their hands to show for their labors, and Iran is on the verge of getting an Iraqi neighbor beyond its wildest dreams.
Yet even now, neoconservatives inside and outside of government are counseling Bush to remain in Iraq for years to prevent the Shiite-dominated regime from collapsing. They also are encouraging him to prepare for battle with Iran and Syria if those countries start meddling in Iraq -- as if they aren't now.
With what exactly and for how long we are supposed to do battle with Tehran and Damascus, the militaristic neocon noncombatants in Washington don't say. But then again, they have a tolerance for risk and cost that exceeds that of those who actually do the fighting and dying.
Forty years ago at Riverside Church, people of conscience declared that "a time comes when silence is betrayal." They went beyond using their voices and votes when they agreed to break their silence. They responded, as King had urged, by matching their words with actions. "We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest," King preached that day.
Yes, this is a different time and a different world. Global terrorism is a sobering reality. And America is on the right side in that war. To not fight back is tantamount to indulging a death wish.
But the first blow in Iraq, which was not a battleground for terrorism, was struck by Bush. He now, stubbornly and in the face of legitimate opposition, proposes to make matters worse.
Remember King and the words: "A time comes when silence is betrayal."
From Dr. King, a Reminder on Iraq
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Forty years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom the nation will honor on Monday, took to the pulpit of Riverside Church in New York City at a meeting organized by Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam. The date was April 4, 1967, one year before his assassination in Memphis.
King said he was in New York because his conscience had left him no choice. In his speech, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," King declared: "That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam."
King acknowledged the reluctance of some people to speak out on Vietnam -- the same hesitation some Americans may have today over voicing their concerns about Iraq. People, he explained, "do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war."
But King concluded that too much was at stake. He and the other religious and lay leaders were moved by what the conflict in Vietnam was doing to the United States. Vietnam, King said, was consuming American troops and money like "some demonic, destructive suction tube" even as that war was laying waste to the Vietnamese people and to America's standing in the world.
And on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in 2007?
More than 3,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq, while 22,000 others have been wounded. Billions of dollars that could have been invested here at home have been spent there, a lot of it wasted, some of it stolen, plenty of it unaccounted for. And Iraqis in Baghdad, who cowered for decades under a brutal dictator, have been living in the midst of violence almost continuously since Saddam Hussein was deposed.
"We are creating enemies faster than we can kill them" read a bumper sticker in Washington this week.
Now enter George W. Bush -- the president who got America into this debacle through a series of misjudgments that would make Alfred E. Neuman look brilliant. This week Bush announced plans to plop down thousands of additional troops in the middle of a sectarian war and to shell out billions of additional dollars to pacify a war-weary Iraqi population that, truth be told, wants America gone.
Why trust this administration?
Contrary to what Bush and his allies said:
· There were no weapons of mass destruction poised to strike America and her allies.
· A quick defeat of Hussein did not lead to chocolates and flowers in the streets of Baghdad.
· An American invasion did not produce a unified, nonsectarian and Western-oriented Iraq or spark a desire for U.S.-style governance throughout the Arab world.
· De-Baathification and the imposition of a market economy at gunpoint did not usher in a period of tranquility or the flowering of capitalism.
The Bush administration struck first because it had the power to strike and the arrogance to think, foolishly, that it could win and dominate the conquered on the cheap.
King spoke in '67 about "the Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them." Witness the Bush team in Iraq.
Today they have a bloodbath on their hands to show for their labors, and Iran is on the verge of getting an Iraqi neighbor beyond its wildest dreams.
Yet even now, neoconservatives inside and outside of government are counseling Bush to remain in Iraq for years to prevent the Shiite-dominated regime from collapsing. They also are encouraging him to prepare for battle with Iran and Syria if those countries start meddling in Iraq -- as if they aren't now.
With what exactly and for how long we are supposed to do battle with Tehran and Damascus, the militaristic neocon noncombatants in Washington don't say. But then again, they have a tolerance for risk and cost that exceeds that of those who actually do the fighting and dying.
Forty years ago at Riverside Church, people of conscience declared that "a time comes when silence is betrayal." They went beyond using their voices and votes when they agreed to break their silence. They responded, as King had urged, by matching their words with actions. "We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest," King preached that day.
Yes, this is a different time and a different world. Global terrorism is a sobering reality. And America is on the right side in that war. To not fight back is tantamount to indulging a death wish.
But the first blow in Iraq, which was not a battleground for terrorism, was struck by Bush. He now, stubbornly and in the face of legitimate opposition, proposes to make matters worse.
Remember King and the words: "A time comes when silence is betrayal."
Thursday, December 14, 2006
wandering, next
I thought this was interesting. Some days when I have time that needs killing, I just click next, next, next on the blogger button. You never know what you'll find. Sometimes a nugget.
Who'da thought a knitting blog would cover this territory?
I'm just copying and pasting it, you can follow the link.
Gandhi and Spinning
by Sharon
My recent hiatus from blogging was also a hiatus from blog reading. Imagine my surprise to come back and discover that the spinning bug had captured even Wendy, arguably one of the most popular and influential knitters on-line! (I am envious, but not surprised, that she is already more accomplished at spinning than I likely ever will be.)
I haven't yet had the leisure to check all 600 or so sites on the knitting blogs webring (from which mine has apparently been booted, with good reason), but I'm curious ... how many other knitters have taken up spinning? What are your motivations?
I'm an occasional spinner, but primarily a knitter. I became interested in spinning long before I took up knitting, but I lacked the opportunity to learn. A few years ago, I noticed an ad in the classifieds for a used spinning wheel and went to check it out. For $100, I purchased an Ashford Traditional, two large bags of raw fleece, a set of drum carders, and three extra bobbins. I ordered the "Hands On Spinning" book and attempted to teach myself. I couldn't get the hang of it. Then good fortune intervened. Our recent year in Colorado brought me into the orbit of the magnificent fiber shop, Shuttles, Spindles and Skeins, and its co-owner and gifted spinning teacher, Maggie Casey. Voila! I finally became a spinner.
My initial interest in spinning was spurred by my admiration of Gandhi. This originated during college, when I wrote a paper in a public policy and ethics class analyzing themes in Salman Rushdie's brilliant masterpiece, Midnight's Children. Researching background on the caste system and the religious struggles featured in this novel led me to the writings of Gandhi. This encounter with Gandhi's life and teachings was perhaps the key turning point of my life. It awakened me to different thinking and banished forever my previous goals of serving only the needs of my pocketbook by pursuing a lucrative career in something like corporate law.
Anyone who knows anything about Gandhi knows that the spinning wheel was the foundation of his plan for India's political and economic independence. He also advocated spinning on moral grounds. One of the most fascinating sections in the Gandhi Reader, (ed. Homer A. Jack) is a published exchange between the Mahatma and the great poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore questioned the value of burning foreign cloth when it could be used to clothe the poor, calling it a "magical formula" instead of the "precise thinking" of economic science that he believed India required (yes, it is odd that a poet would make this argument). Gandhi replied:
"I venture to suggest to the Poet that the clothes I ask him to burn must be and are his. If they had to his knowledge belonged to the poor or the ill-clad, he would long ago have restored to the poor what was theirs. In burning my foreign clothes I burn my shame. I must refuse to insult the naked by giving them clothes they do not need, instead of giving them work which they sorely need. I will not commit the sin of becoming their patron, but on learning that I had assisted in impoverishing them, I would give them a privileged position and give them neither crumbs nor cast off clothing, but the best of my food and clothes and associate myself with them in work."
Gandhi urged all of the people of India, rich and poor alike, to spend at least one hour a day spinning. In addition to the political, economic and moral benefits, he believed that spinning was a deeply meditative act. Of course, he was right. Sadly, I don't spin on most days and it is a rare day indeed that I spin for an entire hour. However, I have sometimes become so relaxed at the spinning wheel that I actually caught myself snoring, while fully awake and still spinning!
(Warning... I'm about to get on my soapbox!)
I'm thrilled that spinning is catching on. While our western industrialized nations are not the India of the British Raj, we are not so different, either. Very few of us, if any, live independently from the sufferings of the poor. Sweatshop labor clothes us, toxic chemicals endanger the agricultural workers who harvest our cheap food, and oligarchs enrich themselves while oppressing the poor in the countries that fuel our vehicles. Even if comfortable Americans, such as myself, are spinning cashmere and silk just for fun (actually, I haven't the confidence to try cashmere or silk yet; I'm still working on basic wool), perhaps we might slightly, even if only for a moment, spin the solidarity that Gandhi envisioned.
At the risk of making this much too long, I leave you with one other influential passage from another novel I read in that same college class. In Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise, a party of comfortable North Americans is traveling by car through an impoverished Central American country. Their conversation:
"What I wonder," Bob Cole said in his strange tremulous voice, "is whether the people down here have to live this way so that we can live the way we do."
"I'm just a soldier," Zeccca said. "But I think the answer to that is no. It sounds too simple to me."
"But it's not a simple question," Marie said brightly. "It's a really complicated one."
Cole turned to Holliwell.
"How about you, sir? You're something of an expert. What do you think the answer is?"
"I have to confess," Holliwell said, "that I haven't figured that out. There are lots of gaps in my expertise. I don't know what the answer is."
"We have to believe it's no, don't we?" Cole asked. "We couldn't face up to it otherwise. Because if most of the world lives in this kind of poverty so that we can have our goodies and our extra protein ration -- what does that make us?"
"It makes us vampires," Holliwell said. "It makes us all the cartoon figures in the Communist press."
"What if you found out it were true?"
"Me? What I do doesn't matter. I'd go on doing what I'm doing."
"How about you, Captain?"
Zecca took one hand from the wheel and turned partway around toward Cole. Marie kept her eyes on the road.
"What are you, Mr. Cole?" Captain Zecca asked. "Some kind of an agitator?" He asked the question humorously, with more of the Toledo in his voice that he usually permitted.
"Not at all," Cole said.
Who'da thought a knitting blog would cover this territory?
I'm just copying and pasting it, you can follow the link.
Gandhi and Spinning
by Sharon
My recent hiatus from blogging was also a hiatus from blog reading. Imagine my surprise to come back and discover that the spinning bug had captured even Wendy, arguably one of the most popular and influential knitters on-line! (I am envious, but not surprised, that she is already more accomplished at spinning than I likely ever will be.)
I haven't yet had the leisure to check all 600 or so sites on the knitting blogs webring (from which mine has apparently been booted, with good reason), but I'm curious ... how many other knitters have taken up spinning? What are your motivations?
I'm an occasional spinner, but primarily a knitter. I became interested in spinning long before I took up knitting, but I lacked the opportunity to learn. A few years ago, I noticed an ad in the classifieds for a used spinning wheel and went to check it out. For $100, I purchased an Ashford Traditional, two large bags of raw fleece, a set of drum carders, and three extra bobbins. I ordered the "Hands On Spinning" book and attempted to teach myself. I couldn't get the hang of it. Then good fortune intervened. Our recent year in Colorado brought me into the orbit of the magnificent fiber shop, Shuttles, Spindles and Skeins, and its co-owner and gifted spinning teacher, Maggie Casey. Voila! I finally became a spinner.
My initial interest in spinning was spurred by my admiration of Gandhi. This originated during college, when I wrote a paper in a public policy and ethics class analyzing themes in Salman Rushdie's brilliant masterpiece, Midnight's Children. Researching background on the caste system and the religious struggles featured in this novel led me to the writings of Gandhi. This encounter with Gandhi's life and teachings was perhaps the key turning point of my life. It awakened me to different thinking and banished forever my previous goals of serving only the needs of my pocketbook by pursuing a lucrative career in something like corporate law.
Anyone who knows anything about Gandhi knows that the spinning wheel was the foundation of his plan for India's political and economic independence. He also advocated spinning on moral grounds. One of the most fascinating sections in the Gandhi Reader, (ed. Homer A. Jack) is a published exchange between the Mahatma and the great poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore questioned the value of burning foreign cloth when it could be used to clothe the poor, calling it a "magical formula" instead of the "precise thinking" of economic science that he believed India required (yes, it is odd that a poet would make this argument). Gandhi replied:
"I venture to suggest to the Poet that the clothes I ask him to burn must be and are his. If they had to his knowledge belonged to the poor or the ill-clad, he would long ago have restored to the poor what was theirs. In burning my foreign clothes I burn my shame. I must refuse to insult the naked by giving them clothes they do not need, instead of giving them work which they sorely need. I will not commit the sin of becoming their patron, but on learning that I had assisted in impoverishing them, I would give them a privileged position and give them neither crumbs nor cast off clothing, but the best of my food and clothes and associate myself with them in work."
Gandhi urged all of the people of India, rich and poor alike, to spend at least one hour a day spinning. In addition to the political, economic and moral benefits, he believed that spinning was a deeply meditative act. Of course, he was right. Sadly, I don't spin on most days and it is a rare day indeed that I spin for an entire hour. However, I have sometimes become so relaxed at the spinning wheel that I actually caught myself snoring, while fully awake and still spinning!
(Warning... I'm about to get on my soapbox!)
I'm thrilled that spinning is catching on. While our western industrialized nations are not the India of the British Raj, we are not so different, either. Very few of us, if any, live independently from the sufferings of the poor. Sweatshop labor clothes us, toxic chemicals endanger the agricultural workers who harvest our cheap food, and oligarchs enrich themselves while oppressing the poor in the countries that fuel our vehicles. Even if comfortable Americans, such as myself, are spinning cashmere and silk just for fun (actually, I haven't the confidence to try cashmere or silk yet; I'm still working on basic wool), perhaps we might slightly, even if only for a moment, spin the solidarity that Gandhi envisioned.
At the risk of making this much too long, I leave you with one other influential passage from another novel I read in that same college class. In Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise, a party of comfortable North Americans is traveling by car through an impoverished Central American country. Their conversation:
"What I wonder," Bob Cole said in his strange tremulous voice, "is whether the people down here have to live this way so that we can live the way we do."
"I'm just a soldier," Zeccca said. "But I think the answer to that is no. It sounds too simple to me."
"But it's not a simple question," Marie said brightly. "It's a really complicated one."
Cole turned to Holliwell.
"How about you, sir? You're something of an expert. What do you think the answer is?"
"I have to confess," Holliwell said, "that I haven't figured that out. There are lots of gaps in my expertise. I don't know what the answer is."
"We have to believe it's no, don't we?" Cole asked. "We couldn't face up to it otherwise. Because if most of the world lives in this kind of poverty so that we can have our goodies and our extra protein ration -- what does that make us?"
"It makes us vampires," Holliwell said. "It makes us all the cartoon figures in the Communist press."
"What if you found out it were true?"
"Me? What I do doesn't matter. I'd go on doing what I'm doing."
"How about you, Captain?"
Zecca took one hand from the wheel and turned partway around toward Cole. Marie kept her eyes on the road.
"What are you, Mr. Cole?" Captain Zecca asked. "Some kind of an agitator?" He asked the question humorously, with more of the Toledo in his voice that he usually permitted.
"Not at all," Cole said.
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