What Destroys the Human Being?

Mahatma Gandhi was asked: what are the factors that can destroy the human being?

This is what he actually replied:

There are seven social sins: politics without principles, wealth without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice.

“Life has shown me that people are courteous if I am courteous; people are sad if I am sad; people love me if I love them; people are mean if I hate them; people smile if I smile; people scowl if I am scowling; that the world is happy if I am happy; that people get mad if I am mad; that people are grateful if I show gratitude. Life is like a mirror; if I smile, the mirror returns the smile. The same attitude I have towards life is what life will have towards me.

“He who wishes to be loved, must love first.”

The Life You Are Capable of Living

To the Crazy Ones...

Indian Man Offers Underprivileged Children Free Education under a Bridge

A torn rug to sit on, a metro bridge for a roof, a patch of wall painted black for a blackboard and a shopkeeper for a teacher. This may look like a scene out of a Hindi movie but is the everyday reality of 39 children from villages near the Yamuna bank.

"Our teacher has told us that when poverty strikes, you should open your mind, and that can be done only through education," Abhishek, 15, a student of Sharma's now attending a government school, told the Indian Express. He aspires to be an engineer when he grows up.

Rajesh Kumar Sharma, 40, offers a free education to New Delhi's slum children under a metro bridge.

Over 30 local Indian children have been attending his open-air, dirt-floor school since it opened three years ago.

A Vocation for Teaching

Children attend class at the Dongzhong (literally means in cave) primary school at a Miao village in Ziyun county, southwest China's Guizhou province. The school is built in a huge, aircraft hanger-sized natural cave, carved out of a mountain over thousands of years by wind, water and seismic shifts.

The Dangerous Way to School

Children in Indonesia have been filmed risking their lives by crossing a collapsed suspension bridge to get to school.

Three bridges in the district of Lebak have given way recently due to flooding.

When the 162m-long bridge that connected Ciwaru village to Sibagi village broke, school children were left with few alternatives for getting to lessons on time.

Kids travel to school via a precarious, high-altitude zipline of 1,300ft, carrying their younger sibs in hemp sacks and slowing their descent with a wooden fork.

Muhammad Ikhwan, a 10-year-old student, said he felt forced to choose crossing the collapsed bridge rather than walking 5km. "It's far if we don't use the bridge. Yes, it's about 5km to walk," he said.

It's exam season in Guinea, ranked 160th out of 177 countries on the United Nations' development index, and schoolchildren flock to the airport every night because it's among the few places where they'll always find the lights on.

Groups of elementary and high school students begin heading to the airport at dusk, hoping to reserve a coveted spot under the oval light cast by one of a dozen lampposts in the parking lot. Some come from over an hour's walk away.

Hellen Keller

Hellen Keller

                                                                       

                               

Children Toil in India’s Mines

The terms Child Labor and child workers were used throughout the original article but have been changed. It is important to emphasize these are expressions that can hardly be read in this blog. Language is a very important manipulative tool used by the oppressors to get people to accept the unacceptable, the unnatural, the abhorrent and, in this case, to create the impression that we are talking about working children. There are 400 million children forced into agricultural work, the textile industry, the mining industry, wars, prostitution, debt servitude, serfdom… and the list of atrocities is endless. They are not working children, they are CHILD SLAVES! 

A young coal miner studied English during a break in Khliehriat, India. The few nearby schools teach in local dialects.

By GARDINER HARRIS

Published: February 25, 2013

The New York Times

KHLIEHRIAT, India — After descending 70 feet on a wobbly bamboo staircase into a dank pit, the teenage miners ducked into a black hole about two feet high and crawled 100 yards through mud before starting their day digging coal.

They wore T-shirts, pajama-like pants and short rubber boots — not a hard hat or steel-toed boot in sight. They tied rags on their heads to hold small flashlights and stuffed their ears with cloth. And they spent the whole day staring death in the face.

Just two months before full implementation of a landmark 2010 law mandating that all Indian children between the ages of 6 and 14 be in school, some 28 million are child slaves instead, according to Unicef. Child slaves can be found everywhere — in shops, in kitchens, on farms, in factories and on construction sites. In the coming days Parliament may consider yet another law to ban child slavery, but even activists say more laws, while welcome, may do little to solve one of India’s most intractable problems.

Woman Reading in the Rain

Micah Albert, USA, Redux Images, 1st Prize Contemporary Issues Single. Taken on 03 April 2012 in Nairobi, Kenya. Pausing in the rain, a woman working as a trash picker at the 30-acre dump, which literally spills into households of one million people living in nearby slums, wishes she had more time to look at the books she comes across. “It gives me something else to do in the day besides picking [trash],” she said.

Teaching is to see the possible start where others stop

“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Fighting Poverty to Build Peace

Once again, as the new year begins, I want to extend good wishes for peace to people everywhere. With this Message I would like to propose a reflection on the theme: Fighting Poverty to Build Peace.

Poverty is often a contributory factor or a compounding element in conflicts, including armed ones. In turn, these conflicts fuel further tragic situations of poverty. “Our world shows increasing evidence of another grave threat to peace: many individuals and indeed whole peoples are living today in conditions of extreme poverty."

The gap between rich and poor has become more marked, even in the most economically developed nations. This is a problem which the conscience of humanity cannot ignore, since the conditions in which a great number of people are living are an insult to their innate dignity and as a result are a threat to the authentic and harmonious progress of the world community” 

In this context, fighting poverty requires attentive consideration of the complex phenomenon of globalization. This is important from a methodological standpoint, because it suggests drawing upon the fruits of economic and sociological research into the many different aspects of poverty. Yet the reference to globalization should also alert us to the spiritual and moral implications of the question, urging us, in our dealings with the poor, to set out from the clear recognition that we all share in a single divine plan: we are called to form one family in which all – individuals, peoples and nations – model their behaviour according to the principles of fraternity and responsibility.

Democracy or Manipulation of the Masses?

Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. “In our country,” said one of them, “to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What’s the secret?”

The secret is a form of censorship more insidious than a totalitarian state could ever hope to achieve. The myth is the opposite. Constitutional freedoms unmatched anywhere else guard against censorship; the press is a "fourth estate", a watchdog on democracy. The journalism schools boast this reputation, the influential East Coast press is especially proud of it, epitomised by the liberal paper of record, the New York Times, with its masthead slogan: "All the news that's fit to print."

It takes only a day or two back in the US to be reminded of how deep state censorship runs. It is censorship by omission, and voluntary. The source of most Americans' information, mainstream television, has been reduced to a set of marketing images shot and edited to the rhythms of a Coca-Cola commercial that flow seamlessly into the actual commercials. Rupert Murdoch's Fox network is the model, with its peep-shows of human tragedy. Non-American human beings are generally ignored, or treated with an anthropological curiosity reserved for wildlife documentaries.

Extract of an article by John Pilger

Napoleon was to say: “the politics of the future will be the art of mobilizing the masses.” 

The Truth about Helen Keller

"The world is moved not only by the mighty stories of heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker."  

Helen Keller

“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a ‘modern miracle.’ But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.”

—Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La Follette, 1924)

Click here to Read the article: The Truth about Helen Keller, by Ruth Shagoury

Published in the Zinn Educational Project

Dadaab Refugee Camp

A Somali refugee girl sits perched on a tree in Ifo camp

Brendan Bannon is a photojournalist on assignment for Polaris Images: 

"I first went to the Dadaab refugee camp, close to the border between Kenya and Somalia, at the end of 2006. Strangely enough, the camp was flooded then. The same parched ground recorded in my photographs was covered by 3 feet of water. Then, people were fleeing from the camp, not fleeing to the camp as they are today. Dadaab has become the largest refugee camp in the world, and Kenya’s fourth largest city: 440,000 people have gathered in makeshift shelters, made of branches and tarps. 

Experiencing Dadaab again last week was profoundly humbling. I was confronted with deep suffering and need. Slowing down and talking to people, I heard stories of indomitable courage and determination and of making horrible choices. Most of these people have survived 20 years of war in Somalia, two years of drought, and it’s only now that they are fleeing their homeland. They are accomplished survivors. 

One morning, I was talking to a family of ten. I poured a full glass of water from a pitcher and passed it to a child. He took a sip, and passed it on to his brother and so on. The last one returned it to me with enough left for the last gulp. Even in the camp, they take only what they need to survive and share the rest. What you see on the surface looks like extreme fragility, but it’s actually tremendous resilience and the extraordinary affirmation of their will to live." 

Paula Nelson

Click here to see other pictures of Dadaab refugee camp by Brenda Bannon

Julián Gómez del Castillo

"Love to others cannot be measured by my possibilities but by their needs."

Julián Gómez del Castillo

10/10/1924-29/10/2006



"Labour over Capital is a Postulate of the Order of Social Morality", John Paul II

Extracts from the encyclical Laborem Exercens, by John Paul II

…capital is being unceasingly created through the work done with the help of all these means of production, and these means can be seen as a great workbench at which the present generation of workers is working day after day.

Thus, the principle of the priority of labour over capital is a postulate of the order of social morality…

In this context it should be emphasized that, on a more general level, the whole labour process must be organized and adapted in such a way as to respect the requirements of the person and his or her forms of life…
 

Seeking a New Society: Resurrection and Solidarity

 

La Resurrección de Cristo, El Greco (1597-1604)

Extract, by Benjamin Cortes

The Gospel is the message of life for the excluded of the earth. Jesus of Nazareth proclaims the word of God to the poor, the exploited, the oppressed and the marginalized by the Roman Empire.

Jesus Christ interprets the word of hope for humanity spoken by the prophet (Isa. 61:1-2) sent by the Lord to the Jews in exile in Babylon to announce the time of return to fullness of life -- the kairos of God which makes it possible for us to be "born anew to a living hope" (1 Pet. 1:3), the time of grace and freedom, the time to rebuild the future and lay the foundations for a life with equal rights for all.

Good news to the poor means that the system of oppression can be transformed into a system of justice. His resurrection is a revolution for the human race, making those who are raised from the dead into the architects and builders of the future. In this resurrection God requires co-workers; it is the utopia at the heart of the Messiah's message and action taking concrete shape in history.

Jesus recognizes the plurality of human life in its spiritual, cultural, political and social dimensions. The actions of Jesus are acts of resurrection.

The logic of the resurrection

New life begins with the resurrection. The logic of the resurrection breaks with death and initiates a process that aims to break with the system of oppression and the motives underlying it. Those who have been raised up were once dead, but they have returned to life and now are the architects of a scheme of society which seeks to be just in its objectives and relationships.

The logic of the resurrection is the antithesis of the logic of the market, which dislocates communities and leads to death. The logic of the market does not solve the problems of countries and regions, nor does it meet the basic needs of the impoverished peoples of the world.

Choking Himself

Tehyi Hsieh

"Action will remove the doubts that theory cannot solve."

                                                                                 by Tehyi Hsieh

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