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Thursday, July 01, 2004
Friday, July 2, 2004
"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy - the chance to draw back - always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." - William H. Murray, Scottish Himalayan Expedition
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Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Thursday, July 1, 2004
"Whenever you are immersed in compulsive thinking you are avoiding what is. You don't want to be where you are. Here, now." - Eckhart Tolle, "Stillness Speaks"
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Wednesday, June 30, 2004
On Sunday night I accompanied a friend on her weekly volunteer visit to a juvenile prison where the most violent youth in Los Angeles County are held. They are all under 18, and 60% of them have committed homicide - many of them on multiple occasions. When they turn 18, they are sent to San Quentin or Pelican Bay or some other such place. One of them was headed out to San Quentin that night to serve a life sentence for murdering three other gang members. They don't kill outside their own demographic really. They kill one another. It was one of the most depressing experiences of my life. I felt death everywhere - the death of their victims, and their own. In a larger sense I felt the death of our whole society. It would take a better writer than I to describe it for you.
On Thursday last the L.A. Times ran a story with a headline, "Justice System is 'Broken,' Lawyers Say," citing a new study to be released by the American bar Association. It quotes Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy saying that, "Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long." I don't know if the mothers of the victims of these kids would agree with that, but it's not these kinds of crimes the article was talking about.
Listen to these statistics it stated:
2.1 million Americans are behind bars;
476 of every 100,000 American are imprisoned, compared to 100 per 100,000 in England, Germany, and Italy;
The average federal drug trafficking sentence in 2001 was 72.7 months, while the average for a manslaughter case was 34.3 months;
Nationwide, more than 40% of the prison population is African-American;
In some American cities, more than 50% of young African American men are under the supervision of the criminal justice system;
A black male born in 2001 has a 1 in 3 chance of being imprisoned during his lifetime, while the chances of a Latino male are 1 in 6, and for a white male, 1 in 17;
By the way, there wasn't one white kid in the two groups I visited Sunday night. Thirty five kids, all Latino and African American. Surely if we can agree on nothing else in this country, we can agree that this data points not to the fundamental evil of these people, but to fundamental problems in the very structure of our society. We are trying to cure a cancer with an aspirin. We must, as Robert Kennedy said, "seek a new world." We must, as Martin Luther King did, find ourselves a great and impossible dream. We must, as Ronald Reagan said, be a shining city on a hill. We must re-think everything. It is only at that level of courage and daring that we will solve these problems before they solve us.
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Tuesday, June 29, 2004
"To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, 'Our country, right or wrong,' and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation." - Mark Twain, "Glances at History," 1906
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Monday, June 28, 2004
Monday, June 28, 2004
I have been embrarassed to some extent to express my belief in pacifism. What if I am wrong? What if George Bush and Henry Kissinger and Paul Wolfowitz are right - that the real way to peace is through military might - that you have to respond to a bully with a big stick? What if my pacifism is simply my own cowardice? Worse, what if pacifism is pollyana, and will end up getting the whole world blown up.
In recent weeks I have come to believe that that is the way we definitely seem to be headed anyway. We are headed toward blowing the whole world up. We keep chasing peace through war and it never really arrives, does it? So I am growing less and less concerned that pacifism is child's play and that it will get the world blown up, and more and more concerned that anything but pacifism is what will.
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Sunday, June 27, 2004
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Always good to remember this one every once in a while:
"Great spirits will always encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
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