I chose to write this week about what's happening in Jena, Louisiana because I would like the readers to understand what in my opinion this is all about. I hope my writings cause you to think about what you value most. My friend Habib Rose, the sweetest of human beings passed away suddenly this week. Habib was the net worker of all net workers. His contribution to social justice and sustainability in the NorthWest has been monumental. His loss will be felt on many levels. He will be missed.

Jena, New Orleans and Climate Change--The Connection

I invite you to find that place in yourself where you can feel and understand the connections about 6 young African Americans boys beating up a white boy and climate change.

I have recently read that there are three times as many African Americans living in prison cells as in college dorms and that New Orleans is the first example in our country where we created large numbers of environmental refuges because of climate change. It will not be the last.

In Jena, Louisiana last week tens of thousands of African Americans came together to express their pain over the unequal treatment that 6 children received by authorities. It is important to understand this event is not just about what happened in Jena and likewise it should not be simplistically considered that an event like Jena stands on its own merit. Human beings are deeply programmed over years by the culture they live in. Jena and New Orleans is a harvesting of our culture and we must learn quickly to understand this.

Jena was also the most recent place where people decided to draw the line after turning away for too long. Being silent and apathetic in the face of oppression never works forever. Jena is about hundreds of years of discrimination that continue to this day. It is about the arrogance and refusal to make reparations or even apologies for the untold damage that our economic based civilization made to an entire segment of its community. It is about refusing to insist that all member of our society should live in communities without rampant crime, poor schools and toxic landfills. It is about refusing to admit that our prisons are filling up with African American children because we don t have time or are too impatient to creatively deal with their problems. It is about being dead or at least anesthetized to our deep feelings about compassion and justice.

There are several museums dedicated to the Jewish Holocaust and untold films have portrayed it from every angle. The African American Holocaust has not received the same massive coverage. A couple of great films were made years ago like Roots and Amistad. But few museums have been created about slavery and the oppression of African Americans, and very few textbooks talk much about slavery. The reality is that the vast majority of Americans do not know that ten million African men, women and children died on the transport ships to the new world from hunger and mistreatment and were buried by being thrown overboard. And this was just the beginning of the story. The suffering included being treated as chattel, having their will and hope broken down by violence, having all elements of meaningful family life denied to them, not permitting children to be educated and then in the final blow blaming them because they are not like the rest of us and can t climb out of the world of poverty by themselves.

I feel frustrated when friends become passionately concerned about conditions such as the Middle East or the Sudan, places 10,000 miles away, but can t seem to understand or be concerned about what is happening in their own neighborhoods across town.

Jena is a lesson that we must begin to understand before it is too late. We are not going to stop climate change if we can t learn to get it about the lack of humanity that exists in our country and on this planet. We must stop sedating ourselves with consumerism and drugs and again feel what pain really feels like. And one important place to begin is at home in the treatment that African American children and other oppressed people receive every day of their lives. We must see that the common thread between climate change and Jena is indifference and inhumanity.

Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hahn writes extensively about finding that place in ourselves where we can understand what it would take to make us violent and cruel humans. He teaches that it is only from that place that we can understand what is needed to fix our world. And fellow Buddhist, Joanna Macy implores us to experience the pain of living in a civilization that is self-destructing. I invite you to begin this process by feeling the pain of people who live in our local communities who are being mistreated by our society on a daily basis. I invite you to find that place in yourself where you can understand the inhumanity that drives 6 young African Americans to beat up a white boy by imagining that all the children involved are your children. I invite you to go deep enough into that pain where tears well up and sobs become uncontrollable. I invite you to become alive again. From that place and only that place we have a chance to save the world.
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ForTheGrandchildren
Editor: Victor Bremson