Kiva, Regrets and Another Woman of Non-Violent Resistance

Tomorrow will be our 4th class. I have to miss it because my neice is getting married at 6:30 pm. I’m really unhappy about missing class. I love this class. Our class discussions and the video and the book we’re using - A Force More Powerful - are so thought provoking.

Last week, Kelley did his "report" from the other text we are using Hope’s Edge. The chapter contained information about mirco-lending - making very small loans to entrepreneurs and to others living in poverty who are not able to get loans from traditional lenders. A couple of years ago I learned about Kiva, which bills itself as "the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website." Since then I’ve told myself that I need to become a lender but I’ve never followed through. 

As I drove home from class I came up with the idea of our class ‘passing the hat’ and becoming a Kiva lender. The idea wouldn’t leave me alone so Wednesday I sent an email to each of my classmates and asked them to consider the idea. So far three of my classmates have responded. Saul - my instructor has also embraced the idea so next Saturday (5/3) we’ll see where it goes.

This week the assigned chapter from A Force More Powerful was about Poland and the Solidarity movement. As I read I was nagged by the fact that I knew so little about the Solidarity movement - espeically through the 1980’s. In 1980 I was 22, an adult. We had a television. I remember hearing little bits and pieces on the evening news here and there, but for the most part I was oblivious of what was happening in Poland. I find this a little ironic because, throughout the 1980’s I worked in a factory and belonged to a union. I can’t help but wonder who my Polish counterparts were and I feel a little ashamed that their struggles didn’t register on my personal radar at the time.

This weeks reading introduced me to another woman of Non-Violent Resistance -

Anna Walentynowicz.

Anna was one of the instigators of the strike at the Lenin Shipyard in 1970. She remained active in the worker’s fight for independent trade unions playing a prominent role throughout the 1980’s.

Anna is still alive. One of the sites I read, said she eventually left Solidarity criticizing Lech Wałęsa’s policies. In January 2005 she received the Truman Reagan Medal of Freedom in Washington on behalf of Solidarity from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

 

Posted: April 26, 2008 Comments (0)

Non-Violent Resistance in Today’s News

Tibetians in India protested the Olympic torch’s arrival in India. They started their protest at the grave of Mahatma Gandhi.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/17/asia/17torch.php

Posted: April 18, 2008 Comments (0)

Women of Non-Violent Resistance: Rachel Corrie

The reading I’m doing for this class, the video we’re watching and our class discussion have stirred me to want to search out the names and faces of women who have made an impact in various non-violent resistance movements.

I remember reading the following post…so I searched it out again.

 Rachel Corrie Rachel Corrie

The Death of Rachel Corrie (by Starhawk)

Nablus, Palestine
March 16, 2003

Today a young woman was killed in Gaza. Young women, but more often young men, get killed in Gaza and the West Bank every day, and the world pays no attention. What was different today is that Rachel Corrie was an American, an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, the group that I’m here with in occupied Palestine. And her death is a particularly horrifying example of the cold-blooded dehumanization that characterizes this occupation.

Rachel was trying to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home. According to the other activists who were with her, she was in dialogue with the operator of the bulldozer. She was working in the spirit of nonviolence that is a guiding principle of the ISM, which provides support for Palestinian civilians and for nonviolent efforts to bring about justice for Palestine. Rachel climbed up on the bulldozer to talk to the soldier in the cockpit. She climbed down. She sat in front of the bulldozer. The soldier in control of the huge machine drove it deliberately over her. He then backed up, and ran over her again. Rachel was twenty-three years old.

I am trying to fathom the mind that could pull the levers and gun the motor to crush the life out of her young body. That choice, that deliberate act of murder that ended her sweet life, seems incomprehensible. But here in occupied Palestine, that murder is a logical outgrowth of the system of total dehumanization that controls every aspect of life, that cannot see the human being in the Palestinian, that claims to be fighting terror by institutionalizing it.

This post can be found in its full text here.

More posts this week on Rachel Corrie as I learn more about her. 

Posted: April 14, 2008 Comments (0)

First Journal Entry

  Our first class started the day after the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther Kings assassination and Saul talked a little about that as he walked us through the syllabus and talked about what we could expect from the class. Saul told us that he was at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963, when King delivered his "I Have a Dream Speech."

Saul said that he was at the other end of the Reflecting Pool and that it was hard to hear every word of the speech because of the size of the crowd, but he said, everytime King said "I have a dream…" it seemed like a jolt of electricity when through the entire crowd.  When Saul told us this, I felt like I was being touched by that same electricity, coming through Saul after all those years. I wonder if other people in the class felt the same thing?

All week I’ve thought about the fact that I’ve never met anyone who was actually, physically present at that march and heard that speech with their very own ears. Not through television. Not through film clips. They were there. They made the effort to be at the march - for the cause of not because they new history was going to be made that day. They heard the speech with their very own ears.

I’ve been thinking this week how that kind of makes Saul unique…that maybe he should record his story of that day at Story Corps so his experience isn’t lost and so that maybe my grand-daughter might be touched by a bit of the electricity that Martin Luther King sent radiating through that massive crowd that day.

 

Posted: April 11, 2008 Comments (0)

What is HUM 455…

 …Non Violent Resistance?

It’s a class that’s offered through Antioch University McGregor’s Under Graduate Studies Program that (from the course catalog) examines 20th century cases in which non-violent resistance has been used to overcome oppression throughout the world. Students study examples from Russia, India, Poland, Germany, Denmark, the U.S., South Africa, the Philippines, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Throughout the quarter the class monitors current anti-war resistance in the U.S. and critically reflects on its means and ends.

One of our assignments is to keep a weekly journal of our thoughts and reactions to what we are learning and things we find that relate to the class.

This is mine. 

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