New Clear Vision

Getting Through Cognitive Dissonance and into Action

by Jan Hart

Our lives are no longer as simple or safe as we once believed.

The institutions we trusted to protect us, serve us, and tell us the truth have proven to be unworthy of our trust. Feeling powerless and afraid, we are easy prey for distractions and false prophets. What happened and where do we go from here?

I remember over 10 years ago reacting with my fellow humans in horrified grief when the planes hit the world trade center. In that moment we Americans came together. We wanted to hear from our leaders, watch the news and respond with action. Initially I agreed with the decision to go into Afghanistan to pursue the terrorists and I stayed glued to the evening news. But with the puzzling shift in focus toward Iraq, my intuitive gut began to question. When ‘weapons of mass destruction’ became a familiar phrase and the march to war gathered momentum, it just didn’t feel right. I wasn’t alone. People around the world were against this invasion and in one day of coordinated action 15 million took to the streets in protest. Read the rest of this entry →

Points of Agreement on the Right and the Left?

by Diane Lefer

Civil rights attorney Michelle Alexander reported in her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, that largely as an intentional consequence of the war on drugs, there are more African American men under correctional control now than were enslaved in 1850. People of color have been rounded up en masse for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses. Alexander concluded all this came about in part as a strategy to deprive African Americans of rights, including the right to vote.

William J. Stuntz, Harvard Law professor, evangelical Christian and self-identified conservative (who sadly died much too young, before his book, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, was published in 2011) argued that black people are disproportionately imprisoned because they commit more crimes, that incarceration rates have risen in part because the system used to be too lenient, that incarceration keeps at least the incarcerated from committing more crimes, and that police carry out drug sweeps in certain neighborhoods as a strategy to get gang members off the streets when threats against witnesses and the no-snitch culture create daunting obstacles to the arrest and prosecution of violent criminals. Read the rest of this entry →

Immediate Action Needed on Climate Change

by Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez

Now if only President Obama could show the same leadership on climate change as he has just demonstrated on the divisive same- sex-marriage issue.

The same narrow-minded interests that made same-sex marriage such a boogeyman for the President are also controlling the GOP-dominated boardrooms of Big Oil, from Mr. Cheney on down.

Promoting Personal and Communal Responsibility

by Windy Cooler

“Bite this stick,” the doctor might have said as we birthed our children a hundred years ago. The grunting,  whimpering, sobbing, pleading, sweating, stinking, bleeding nudity of motherhood channeled into that sweet gag, silent, as the towels mount to soak up all of the  nasty animal we are as we labor with the promise of life. Bite this stick.

To date, my most popular blog entry (Of Mice and Moms), is one in which I refuse the bite the stick. It is  vaguely about Mother’s Day and it is, honestly, the kind of screaming that does not produce life. Birth is a channeling of the pain, down, not up into the air,  pushing through it, sinking, a kind of focus that for all the animal smell, is what is truly animal. But the response from other mothers, and even fathers,  people in general, to my scream was huge.  I was a little taken aback. We are angry. We are sad. Read the rest of this entry →

Let’s Get on With Our Lives…

by Robert C. Koehler

Nothing fills an emotional void quite like the piercing drone of bagpipes. No matter the kids were rolling their eyeballs as they shuffled two-by-two into the stifling field house — this was profound, and I was on the verge of tears.

Oh, there she is. My daughter. Gulp. Eighteen years old. A college student. I stifled the impulse to wave and embarrass her still further. We had fleeting eye contact, then she turned to the business of finding her seat, one of almost 500 reluctant stars of this event.

I sympathized with their reluctance. Ceremony is about the past, not the future; and the past, represented by a thousand graying moms and dads looking on from the bleachers, wasn’t quite ready to let them go. It had them in its loving tangle. They were making the best of it.

I knew how self-conscious I would have been. All weekend I’d been reliving my own undergraduate career. The previous night, after arriving in St. Paul — a seven-hour trek from Chicago — we’d gone to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant and I couldn’t shut up about the old days, and the wonder that I had survived them. Read the rest of this entry →

Hydraulically Fracturing Our Humanity

by Tina Lynn Evans and Tom Kerns

{Editor’s note: Environment and Human Rights Advisory recently released a report on the human rights implications of hydraulic fracturing. The report’s author Tom Kerns, Executive Director of EHRA, and Tina Lynn Evans, who organized the network of individuals and organizations that brought the report to fruition, reflect on the intersection between environmental damage and damage to human health. They call upon us to consider the fundamental moral implications of fracking and to use the concept of universal human rights as a defining feature of our engagement with the environment and other people.}

I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man; Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand. — Bob Dylan

“It’s the economy, stupid.” That refrain from the 1992 presidential election would aptly describe the subject of most concern to many in the U.S. today. This is not surprising in the aftermath of the bursting housing bubble and the larceny committed by the banks (with government assistance), and it’s not surprising in an atmosphere of crushing unemployment and myriad underwater mortgages. Read the rest of this entry →

Peace and Justice Activists, Assemble!

by Matt Meyer

It has been one of those life-affirming weeks. When something that has been a part of you for decades finally gets the attention and admiration you’ve felt it has deserved all along, a special pride is evoked; you can now pass it coolly and smoothly on to your own children and to the next generation. I’m speaking, of course, of the new, mainstream Hollywood blockbuster: the Avengers.

OK, by now the reader may be wondering if they are viewing the correct website, where movie reviews of major new releases, especially apparently militaristic ones, are not commonly lauded. Allow me to explain, or rather — to confess. Since about age eight, now more than forty years ago, I have been a more-than-avid Avengers fan-boy. At first, it was just a simple reader’s favorite, one of many comic books which sparked my imagination at a young age. As I grew older, however, and the others were swept aside and replaced by passionate interests in music, and then my grown-up commitment to the movements for social change, the Avengers remained a faithful reminder of fun things past and maybe possible; I’d take my vacations each August finding a comic book shop and buying the past years’ worth of stories, catching up on old friends. When I landed my first substantial paycheck, one of my first acts (after paying numerous bills!) was to go to a local comic convention and fill in the “blanks” of my still-preserved Avengers collection — including the rare and wonderful “first issue.” Read the rest of this entry →