New Clear Vision

The Empire Sticks Around; Will Democracy Strike Back?

by Robert C. Koehler

“Mr. Obama and his senior national security advisers have sought to reassure allies and answer critics, including many Republicans, that the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf even as it winds down the war in Iraq and looks ahead to doing the same in Afghanistan by the end of 2014.”

I pluck a paragraph from the New York Times and for an instant I’m possessed by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, aquiver with puzzlement down to my deepest sensibilities. I hold you here, root and all, little paragraph. But if I could understand what you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what empire is, and hubris . . . and maybe even, by its striking absence, democracy. (more…)

Occupy the Winter of Our Discontent

by David Swanson

Palestinian Youth Channel an Old Struggle Through New Media

by Michelle Chen

(Editor’s Note: This week on NCV, as part of a thematic series, we are featuring articles focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict and attendant issues, hoping to stimulate a dialogue and suggest potential ways forward.)

On the last day of class, we’re unplugging the media revolution. The last session of my social media training program at An Najah University, in the city of Nablus in the West Bank, has been sabotaged by a campus-wide Internet outage, a scheduling mishap that left the students locked out of the computer lab, and a general lethargy afflicting summer-session students in the oppressive summer heat.

So I sit down with the four students who showed up, all primly dressed Palestinian young women, and ask them about what they’ve gleaned from the past few days of tweeting and blogging bootcamp. (more…)

Why Aren’t We ‘Raising Hell’ for Sustainability, Peace, and Prosperity?

by David Swanson

Yes, yes, poverty exists, just as war does, and the two feed off each other.  When I titled a book War Is A Lie I meant that the justifications offered for wars were false and that the idea that we must always have wars is false.  Our government doesn’t market new poverty campaigns in the same way it does wars.  It markets campaigns to dismantle healthcare and pension systems or to eliminate foreign aid or to restrict organizing rights.  But our culture pushes the false notion that poverty must always be with us.

The fact is that our nation and our world are capable of environmental sustainability, peace, and the eradication of poverty.  We’ve spent a decade racing headlong away from these goals in response to dramatic crimes that killed 3,000 people.  The fact that 10,000 people have died from perfectly preventable causes in Africa alone every single day for those 10 years somehow gets lost in our self-obsessed, short-sighted, fear-driven, greed-excusing, corporate communications system. (more…)

Sowing the Seeds of Planetary Nonviolence

by Winslow Myers

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” — Rumi, circa 1250 A.D.

Keeping the biggest possible picture in mind, paradoxically, may give us the best lens through which to focus clearly upon the messy details of our lives at every level — internationally, nationally, locally, even personally.

How big a picture? Try: the whole earth and everything and everyone on it, through hundreds of millions of years of time.

What can this abstract immensity have to do with our own lives? More than we think, because we really are a product of the changes the earth has undergone over eons and we are totally subject to the rules that dictated those changes. By rules we mean big processes, ones we are still trying to fully understand. Processes like evolution itself. (more…)