New Clear Vision

Community Leads Its Own Efforts in the Rockaways

by Victoria Law

Months before Sandy devastated the Rockaways, tragedy had already struck Rockaway resident Sharon Plummer. While bicycling home from the corner store, Plummer’s 18-year-old son Shawn was caught in crossfire on Beach 29 Street and Seagirt Avenue. He died before reaching the hospital.

“The community was there for me,” Plummer recalled in a phone interview with Truthout. Two days after Sandy, Plummer was there for her community. In the parking lot of a laundromat on Cedar Boulevard, she set up Rockaway Guardians In Memory of Shawn Plummer, a distribution center, giving out water, canned goods, toiletries and baby supplies to hundreds of people each day.

Other residents joined the effort. Rudolph McBeam lives a block from the laundromat. “I just walked over there,” he told Truthout. “There were two other persons. We set up some tables and began to give out things to the public.” Although he has lived in the area for 15 years and has helped set up music festivals on the beach,  “This is my first time being involved with something like this,” said McBeam. (more…)

Reflections on Two Years (and Counting) of New Clear Vision

With the passage of another year, we are provided with an opportunity to reflect on what was and project toward what might be. Undoubtedly, for most of the planet’s inhabitants, 2012 will be remembered as a year where the stakes got higher and the cause for alarm grew louder.

Around the world, we are seeing mass movements for change, yet also mass complacency as the issues before us grow more complex and the elite decision-makers more remote in their processes and politics.

Here at New Clear Vision, we try to help make sense of these tidings by bringing forth incisive analysis of the news of the day, all wrapped with our usual penchant for highlighting solution-oriented perspectives and cultivating a sense of grounded optimism for the future. We are under no illusions that the road ahead will be easy, nor that hopefulness alone will somehow turn things around. Rather, we take the view that positive change is more likely to occur when people are motivated toward something instead of being in retreat or apathy. (more…)

American Violence, from Sand Creek to Sandy Hook

by Devon G. Peña

Je sais bien, mais quand-même [I know very well, but nevertheless…] — Octave Mannoni

The airwaves have been filled with agonizing reflections about the mass murder of innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. There was wall-to-wall cable news coverage, endless interviews, moving eulogies at funerals, and a steady stream of talking head reflection. The public discourse turned on the questions of why and how this mass slaughter occurred.

The liberal response went along the lines of: There are too many assault weapons and high capacity magazine clips; it is too easy for the mentally ill to get weapons; mental health services for the growing at-risk population are inadequate. The conservative line espoused by Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association (NRA) revolves around the fundamentalist idea that the “only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” So, the Sandy Hook massacre occurred because the principal and teachers were unarmed. We are to fight gun violence with more gun violence. (more…)

Following Newtown, What We Can Do to Heed the Warnings

by Michael N. Nagler

The wisest man I had the privilege of knowing in my life once said, “There is no nation, no matter how powerful, that cannot be destroyed by hate.”

The latest tragedy — and I sincerely hope it will still be the latest when you read this — has been unparalleled in its violence. Because the true measure of violence is not in the body count but in the violation of the sacred life that we hold most dear, for example in our innocent children.  It has also been unusual in the confusion that still surrounds what exactly happened.  Like most of us, I at first found myself poring over the sketchy reports, trying to understand how it happened, to piece together the story.  But then I stopped. (more…)

‘I Have Friends There, and I Don’t Know What to Do’

by Christine Baniewicz

My best recurring celebrity-demagogue fantasy starts like this: My boss calls me into his office…

“Christine,” he says, leaning back into his executive office chair, hands clasped across his belly. I’m perched at the edge of my seat across from him. My shoulders hunch down, preemptively apologetic.

“Mind telling me what the fuck this is about?” There’s a laptop open on his desk and I rise from my seat, cross closer to him, close enough to catch a faint whiff of his older-guy Polo deodorant and there, pasted across his computer screen like a smear of virtual finger paint, is my essay “Tears of Gaza”.

My stomach liquefies. My neck sweats. Physiological apocalypse sweeps across my body and I attempt to say something with dignity, like “I wrote that because I have friends who live in Palestine.” But I’m too far melted down and it comes out soupy, wet, and quiet. (more…)

American Mothers Must Unite Against the Culture of Violence

by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

A couple of weeks ago, when I heard that my 14-year-old son and his friend had been playing with the other boy’s air-soft pistols by shooting each other at close range, I saw red.

“But it just stings like a bee-sting, Mom,” my son protested.  “It just leaves a welt.  Why are you getting so upset?”

At the time, I wasn’t sure why I was getting so upset — after all, these were only toy guns.

My answer to my son was that a “bullet” could ricochet and end up hitting him in the eye, which is true and a rational explanation for why I flatly forbid him to engage in that kind of behavior any more with those guns. (more…)

“O that there were some virtue in my tears . . .” – Shakespeare

by Winslow Myers 

One of the Dalai Lama’s first principles is something he calls “universal responsibility.” However quick we are to place His Holiness on a saintly pedestal, it is only because the threshold of our own responsibility sometimes seems so very low — especially at this moment of reflection upon the massacre of the innocents in Newtown.

From a tearful President on down through the powerful talk radio demagogues to ordinary citizens, we all bear a share of responsibility for the climate of violence that is the context for the tragedy in Newton. I’m as responsible as anyone because I haven’t yet written my representative concerning my strong feelings about gun control. Great Britain endured 58 firearm murders in 2011, while America had 8,775. Great Britain banned modern handguns altogether in 1997 and studies show a slow but steady decrease in crimes involving handguns in the UK ever since. (more…)