To download a printable copy, click here
(To copy: the pages are vertical 8.5×11 with the fold going horizontally through the middle. There are four pages to every double-sided paper. The two sides must be upside-down in relation to each other to account for the vertical fold. So side one will have pages 1 and 24 and side two will have pages 2 and 23. I print the two hand-out pages separate from the ‘zine as they don’t follow the same format. I know its confusing, but you’ll figure it out.)

Alicia Hernandez, an indigenous rights organizer, commented, “We are not immigrants on our own continent.”  Hernandez has called for the US to ratify the UN Treaty on Indigenous Rights and has been vocal opposition to laws such as recently passed HB87.

The discovery has become the number one discussion across the state. In Ms. Finkel’s fifth grade class at Washington Carver Elementary, Michael, a student there, “It’s kinda like when you put something on your seat so people know you have dibs but when you come back someone else is sitting there and won’t give it back. It’s not fair.”

Officials are still scrambling to adjust to the revelation. An Immigration and Customs Officer speaking on condition of anonymity said the agency doesn’t know what to do with the hundreds of immigrants currently identified for deportation through its partnership with local police. “All this time, we’ve been saying ‘show me your papers.’ Those ruins over in the North seem to serve as some pretty heavy documents.”

Carbon-dating performed on the ruins place the artifacts as having been created near 900 AD, at least 800 years before the foundation of the state of Georgia. The archeological site is seen as evidence of the continental travel indigenous historians have claimed was common before the invention of borders accompanying nation-states.

Deal concluded his press conference with news that stunned the crowd who had gathered, pleased some, and outraged anti-immigrant hardliners of the Dustin Inman Society. “Especially as an elected official, it’s hard to admit when you’re wrong. But as a person, it’s a brave thing to do what is right. I am hereby rescinding HB87. It would seem that we may not only owe the indigenous people of this land, not just those who built these ruins but all those who this state has wronged, an apology. We may owe them some back taxes as well.”For the actual news, not satire, on the Mayan site, click here.

To download a printable version, click here.
(To copy: the pages are vertical 8.5×11 with the fold going horizontally through the middle. There are four pages to every double-sided paper. The two sides must be upside-down in relation to each other to account for the vertical fold. So side one will have pages 1 and 24 and side two will have pages 2 and 23. I know its confusing, but you’ll figure it out.)

The fact that practitioners of meditation or Buddhism would be drawn to the rallies is not a non-sequitur. In fact, the message of Occupy is one based in the dharma, “we’re all in this together.” The challenge to the 1% is a challenge to individualism and an affirmation of our interconnectedness. It also rings as a challenge for many Buddhists about what it means to apply the dharma in engaged practice. What many have come to realize is that interconnectedness means fight.

Foundation.

When I was fifteen years old I was in my ninth year of Catholic school. I had internalized Catholic social teaching based upon “treat others as you would like to be treated” as well as my parents’ lessons that taught me to share with others. However, as we reached the age to begin preparation for college and thus career track, the messages subtly shifted. During that coming of age we also became more aware of the dynamics of the world; of poverty and discrimination. In the modern segregation of the middle class suburb where I was raised, we began to realize that the adults in our lives didn’t necessarily practice our childhood lessons; that the circle of compassion we were taught to extend only extended so far.

That year, at the same time that I learned about Sister Diana Ortiz in El Salvador, I was handed Living Buddha Living Christ by Thich Nhat Hanh. Sr. Diana Ortiz was a nun who was tortured by men who took orders, by her account, from a blond haired man with an American accent. It was later revealed that he was trained by the US government at a military base called the School of the Americas. The news was a shock to my well-educated but sheltered system. How could I not only be unaware this was happening but unaware that it was happening in my name? As I grappled to reassemble my reality, Thich Nhat Hanh’s words laid a path of understanding for my next uncertain steps.

Spiritual Warriors.

I took refuge in the dharma and opened myself to the reality that there is no division between self and other. As Chogyam Trungpa writes, the heart of a spiritual warrior is a sorrowful one because it is in touch with the conditions of the world. I came to understand that my happiness and sorrow are made of your happiness and sorrow and that has specific meaning in the times we live in.

These teachings remixed with Archbishop Romero of El Salvador saying “It is unjust to have more than one needs when others have not enough.” And Howard Zinn writing “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” As someone who benefits from the racial, economic, and gender inequalities that exist, interconnectedness meant taking on the situations of others as my own. While suffering is universal, oppression is specific. To truly embody interconnectedness, it means going beyond Dr. King’s famous words that “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere” and to accept an injustice anywhere as an injustice everywhere. Like a gossamer web, wherever there are holes, the whole is weakened.

Sanghas and Social Responsibility.

However, what seemed like a natural progression to me wasn’t reflected in the sanghas I approached. Whereas my budding Buddhism was steeped with Catholic social teaching’s preferential option for the poor and the Beatitudes prophesy that the first shall come last and the last shall come first, the majority of sanghas I sought out attempted to swipe away society’s very real stratifications as illusion. Instead of non-attachment being cause for us to be willing to let go of the material security our families or our careers had afforded, it became a reason to not engage in the cause of the marginalized. The righteous hot anger I felt at witnessing people sleeping in doorsteps, families being evicted from their homes, or law enforcement hassling youth of color was confused with rage and seen as unenlightened.

The sites of a teaching that had attracted me as a mindful way to be in a mindless world seemed too similar to the safe harbors suburbanites drew around themselves as they locked their doors as they drove into the city, a barrier to the suffering of the world, not an immersion in it. I found places of consciousness without conscience. The deep and heartfelt challenge to my own way of living that bounded out from the pages of Buddhist texts I read was rarely to be found among those who I sat alongside on zafus.

The Golden Rule: Sacred Reciprocity.

To internalize interconnectedness means being compelled to act. We take action on a daily basis to advocate for ourselves in our own lives and we daily witness others being treated in ways that, if it were directed at ourselves, would not be tolerated. What would you do if it were you facing eviction, real hunger, dangerous working conditions, or worse? Would sitting and prayer be the only recourse you call upon? If there’s more that you would do for yourself, than we are called to do more for others. To inverse the concept of how to treat others, we could also say “Do not tolerate for others what you would not also tolerate for yourself.”

There is a beautiful alignment between the dharma and some political slogans like “No one is free while others are oppressed.” In today’s world, can we accept that there is no individual enlightenment without collective liberation? And that liberation is both spiritual and material. As Dr. King said, “peace is not only the absence of violence but the presence of justice.”

If “everyone in the sangha speaks for the Buddha, speaking for him not just by their words but by the way they act and the way they treat people,” what would our actions show beyond being mild-mannered and conflict avoidant? What do our lives speak not just as individuals but as part of the collective, the whole? It is a worthwhile question because injustices are not an individual experience. They are a collective wound. Thus, healing those wounds takes place through a process of collective struggle.

If we are to embody the belief that we are one, it means walking in the sacred reciprocity of being there for each other. It means working and caring for the well-being of not just those who we know and love but those unknown and unloved by us. It means challenging ourselves to continually expand our circle of compassion and to take action as if the cause of those most marginalized was our own, because it is. It means accepting that interconnectedness means fight.

Click here to add your #OccupyScripture

Occupy Wall Street is a game changer in public dialogue in the US. While community groups have been working tirelessly in the trenches for years (decades, centuries) to expose, confront, and transform unequal distributions of wealth and power, our words and actions have largely been relegated to the margins of public discourse. Further, for a variety of reasons, the analysis and messaging that groups do put out have been either shy to or unable to launch systemic critiques from within reform campaigns, let alone question capitalism.

With the emergence of Occupy Wall Street, a main story line has also broken through to the center that society is organized for the benefit of 1% at the expense of 99% of us. The story places Wall Street, as a symbol of capitalism, as the villain in the story and “the rest of us” as the victims and potential heroes.

The group, smartMeme, talks about moments of “psychic breaks” where current events cause the foundation that our world views are built upon to shake. During those moments, we are more open to new ideas, rewriting the story, and questioning the master narrative told by those in control.

Whereas, if a month ago a migrant rights organization put out a statement saying that if ICE were serious about its supposed policy focusing on ‘criminals’ than it should raid wall street, they would likely have been red-baited or dismissed as irrelevantly left. Now such a dialogue is seen as normal and within the parameters of political discourse.

Occupy Wall Street has moved the needle to the left and opened a space for us to talk about economic injustice in deep and root-addressing ways. A whole field of discussion which was psychologically off-limits for many people is now fair game.

2. Exposure for a New Generation of Changemakers

There is a difference between people who “don’t get it” and people who “haven’t gotten it yet” when it comes to how power, privilege, and oppression work in the real world. Recognizing that, can we have both the bravery to confront injustice as well as the humility to see ourselves in the people we meet each day and meet participants as new recruits in the long legacy of struggle as we walk through this?

Like the global justice protests that occurred a decade ago, Occupy Wall Street has become an entry point into social justice for hundreds if not thousands of young people. It’s a teachable moment. Taking place in parks across the country are exchanges with community groups who arrive to share their work. In New York, Domestic Workers United and Movimiento Por Justicia en el Barrio are just two who have held presentations with participants to share with them the on-going change-work that occurs in working class and communities of color; the work that will book end this particular flashpoint.

The political exposure participants will gain through experienced organizers deliberately engaging them, through experiencing or witnessing police brutality, and through the process of tasting that rare feeling of momentum, will develop a new generation of lifelong changemakers.

3. Opportunity to Sieze the Moment, Make a Leap.

Regardless of if one chooses to engage in a general assembly, gather in an “Occupied” park or not, Occupy Wall Street has opened a movement moment for us all to advance through.  If history is made by a series of opening and closing windows of opportunity, an organizer’s role is to be prepared and to have people prepared to make a leap through the window when it opens. The raised profile of Right to the City’s actions against Bank of America in Boston, the Take Back Chicago March, and the San Francisco action that shut down a Wells Fargo in protest of foreclosures are all examples of community organizing groups seeing this moment as “a national platform to shine the light on work we’ve been doing for years,” as Amisha Patel from Grassroots Collaborative in Chicago explained in an interview during a week of actions that mobilized thousands and were featured in the Business section of the Chicago Tribune.

Many of us have been itching for the chance when our hard work could be center stage and we could spark a public debate about the roles of banks and corporations in our politics and our economy. It’s happening. One organizer from the San Francisco action observed, “I’ve never been part of something that’s gotten such widespread positive press.” It’s not necessarily because the actions have changed. It’s because the moment has. It’s up to us to sieze it.

In the messaging workshop, we used the upcoming Phoenix Pride as the example to center our training around. The group had rightful critiques of the corporate and commercial nature of Pride, it’s focus on buff white male bodies, and most importantly it’s sponsor Budweiser, a boycott target for the company’s role in funding SB 1070. As we roleplayed the various scenarios of confrontation, we quickly fell into a familiar dynamic of being the angry outsiders attempting to shame the event organizers and participants for their wrong-doing. In the practice we had strong and sharp arguments but envisioned delivering them in head-on collisions. We got angry. We felt powerless. We felt marginal and prepared for scenarios of being kicked out of Pride or just ignored.

Then something shifted.

What if instead of centering the messed up aspects of Pride in the action, we centered the fabulous aspects of ourselves? By putting ourselves in the spotlight we make the same political points, the same argument. But instead of being the annoying mosquito that Pride would swat away, we could be the life of the party. By celebrating our greatness that surpassed the narrow definitions of Gay Pride, we could both highlight their contradictions and invite them to the more expansive place we already exist in.

We have more to be proud of than what Pride offers. Suddenly, the workshop became joyous. Instead of kicking rocks at Pride, people affirmed what we like about ourselves. For the march, Third Space donned t-shirts with various messages: “I’m proud of my size. I’m proud of my raza. I’m proud of my femmeness.” And also highlighted the problems. “My boyfriend crosses borders: Boycott budweiser. My gender crosses borders: Boycott Budweiser.”

Across the country people are planning events questioning whose pride Pride has become? In an act of visionary organizing, Third Space shows that we can do more than just shame the capitol G Gays, we can show that we all have more to be proud of.