Edward Abbey quote

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."

Happy Earth Day!

"Earth Day is the first completely international and universal holiday that the world has ever known. Every other holiday was tied to one place, or some political or special event. This day is tied to Earth itself, and to the place Earth in the whole solar system."

-Margaret Mead

Celebrating Coretta, Who Celebrated Nonviolence--and Stopped Eating Animals

by Stephanie Ernst

This is the day when we annually celebrate the life, spirit, contributions, and philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr. But I'm not going to write about MLK today. I'm going to write, just briefly, about Coretta. Those opposed to the idea of animal rights, those who consider the fight for animal rights to be distinct from and lesser than other social justice movements, and--most clearly--those who consider veganism extreme could learn something from Coretta Scott King.

For more than the last decade of her extraordinary, compassionate, and passionate life, Coretta Scott King was a vegan. Really. Not an "extremist," not a "fanatic," not a "one-note," "single-issue" zealot--just a vegan.

In addition to fighting against racial injustices, Coretta Scott King fought openly and loudly for LGBT rights. She opposed war and violence and championed peace. And for the last 15 years of her life, she improved her own health and life and saved hundreds of animals' lives by refusing to eat their bodies or what came from their bodies.

On her health, she said in Ebony in 2003, "I feel blessed that I was introduced to this lifestyle more than 12 years ago by Dexter. I prefer to eat mostly raw or 'living' foods. The benefits for me are increased energy, a slowing of the aging process, and I have none of the diseases like hypertension, heart disease and diabetes that many people my age seem to get." And Coretta and Martin Luther King's son Dexter, also a vegan and, as noted, the one who introduced his mother to the lifestyle, considers veg*nism the "logical extension" of his father's philosophy of nonviolence, reported Vegetarian Times in 1995 in the write-up of the magazine's interview with him.

Every time someone remarks or implies that vegans are nothing but animal rights "fanatics" or health-obsessed neurotics who care about nothing else, who are vegans to the exclusion of caring about or fighting against any other injustices, one of the many people who comes to mind as proving this wrong is Coretta Scott King. So today I remember and honor not only Martin Luther King Jr. but Coretta Scott King as well. If I must be an extremist or a fanatic simply because I am a vegan, then I am at least happy with the company.

From here.

Martin Luther King taught us all nonviolence. I was told to extend nonviolence to the mother and her calf. -Dick Gregory

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. -Martin Luther King Jr.


Cowardice asks the question, "Is it safe?"
Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?"
Vanity asks the question, "Is it popular?"
But conscience asks the question, "Is it right?"
And there comes a point when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one's conscience tells one that it is right. -Martin Luther King Jr.

Happy New Year!

I've been listening to this song compulsively. So, as the first post of the new year, I revert to being a 15 year old and, thus, post song lyrics!

"Prayer of the Refugee" by Rise Against

Warm yourself by the fire, son,
And the morning will come soon.
I’ll tell you stories of a better time,
In a place that we once knew.

Before we packed our bags
And left all this behind us in the dust,
We had a place that we could call home,
And a life no one could touch.

Don’t hold me up now,
I can stand my own ground,
I don’t need your help now,
You wont let me down, down, down!

Don’t hold me up now,
I can stand my own ground,
I don’t need your help now,
You wont let me down, down, down!

Down!

We are the angry and the desperate,
The hungry, and the cold,
We are the ones who kept quiet,
And always did what we were told.

But we’ve been sweating while you slept so calm,
In the safety of your home.
We’ve been pulling out the nails that hold up
Everything you’ve known.

Don’t hold me up now,
I can stand my own ground,
I don’t need your help now,
You wont let me down, down, down!

Don’t hold me up now,
I can stand my own ground,
I don’t need your help now,
You wont let me down, down, down!

So open your eyes child,
Let’s be on our way.
Broken windows and ashes
Are guiding the way.

Keep quiet no longer,
We’ll sing through the day,
Of the lives that we’ve lost,
And the lives we’ve reclaimed.

Go!

Don’t hold me up now,
I can stand my own ground,
I don’t need your help now,
You wont let me down, down, down!

Don’t hold me up now,
I can stand my own ground,
I don’t need your help now,
You wont let me down, down, down!

Don’t hold me up…
(I don’t need your help, I’ll stand my ground)
Don’t hold me up…
(I don’t need your help)
No! No! No!
Don’t hold me up!
(I don’t need your help, I’ll stand my ground)
Don’t hold me up!
(I don’t need your help)
Don’t let me down, down, down, down, down!

Happy Solstice!

Noam Chomsky on Anarchism (interview quote)

Sonali Kolhatkar, host and producer of Uprising Radio, interviewing Noam Chomsky.

SK: Professor Chomsky, you have identified with anarchist politics throughout your political career. How have your views on anarchism evolved over the years- do you see it as a viable worldview on a mass scale in terms of achieving social justice to solve the problems of the type we were just discussing [nuclear war and environmental destruction, specifically- ed.]?

NC: Well I’ve, since childhood, when I was haunting anarchist bookstores and anarchist offices in New York since- from then until today. I’ve essentially understood anarchism to be not a specific recipe for how the world should work, although it has principles. But rather, as a kind of tendency in human affairs towards trying to identify structures of hierarchy, oppression, domination- where ever they may be from the family, to international affairs. Identifying them, insisting they justify themselves- they are not self-justifying- and if they can’t make that burden of justification, moving to dismantle them. Hence, move towards a more free world. Exactly where it’ll lead, I don’t know. I’m certainly not smart enough to say and I don’t think anyone is. Political activism, I think, is a little bit like mountain climbing. You work hard, you climb a peak and you discover to your surprise that there’s another peak, back there, that’s even higher that you hadn’t even known about and you start to work on that one. Well, yeah, that’s what things are like. There’s lots of peaks around there that have not entered into our consciousness and I hope we get to them, but there’s a lot of work to get to until we do. As this proceeds, we get closer to a kind of anarchist vision.

A Martin Luther King quote

"Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will."

- Letter From a Birmingham Jail, 1963

On Election Day

...at the height of the primary campaign, then-Senator Obama was asked, “Who would Martin Luther King support? Would you support you or Senator Clinton?” And without his frequent pauses in thinking, he said, “He wouldn’t support either of us. He’d be out in the street building an independent social justice movement.”

On An Inconvenient Truth.

"If everybody in the Unites States did everything that Al Gore... suggested in that movie [An Inconvenient Truth -ed.], then that would reduce emissions by about 21%. The consensus these days is that for further disaster to be averted, emissions need to be reduced by 80%"- Derrick Jensen

"They hate our freedom!"

“You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.” — Clarence Darrow

Quote of the Day.

Walt Whitman

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men—go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families—re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem.”