The following is an update from Suzanne
Taylor and TheConversation.org Making Sense of These Times [http://www.theconversation.org] Website. Thank you for
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June 30,
2002
COLUMN FROM GEOV PARRISH: A World of Hurt: Telecom Giant Goes
Way of Enron and Other Bloated Corporate Creatures -- July 26,
2002
Suzanne's
comments: Geov takes the rapier to
WorldCom, and to the corporate culture in which it thrived. He is such a good
read. "...until global capitalism makes room for a different kind of accounting
altogether -- one that incorporates moral values and social costs and benefits
into business decisions big and small -- scandals big and small will keep right
on happening."
Other quotes drawn
from the column:
Well, knock me over
with a junk bond. Yesterday, WorldCom's world of hurt finally broke out of the
business pages and into the headlines...
At what point does an avalanche
of similar (or even identical) crimes become an indictment not of one particular
executive or company or accounting firm, but of an entire economic system?...
Even today, as Bush self-righteously thunders that WorldCom's corporate
behavior is unacceptable blah blah blah, he's busy cramming in as many
fundraising opportunities as possible all summer long before the soft money
tactics he's ridden all the way to the White House become officially illegal
this fall. And every other D.C. politician is doing the same thing, only not as
efficiently.
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FIVE STAR
PIECE: The Age of
Acquiescence,
Maureen Dowd --
June 26, 2002
Suzanne's comments: Maureen Dowd is one of the pre-eminent voices
of our day. She's eloquent here -- she melted my heart, and that's a good place
to engage one another. Treat yourself to this rueful reminiscence about where
the flower children have gone. "...we've turned into the same selfish people we
thought we were against."
Other
quotes drawn from the piece:
A friend of mine over the weekend was
recalling her days as an idealistic child of the 60's...
She recalled
all the old leftist tracts in the Nixon years about a secret government plan to
suspend the Constitution and declare a national security emergency and round up
people without charges, and that the oil companies and banks would plunge us
into nuclear war.
"And now," she concluded with a rueful smile, "all our
worst paranoid nightmares are coming true. We wake up in our 50's and our
enemies from the 60's have crept back into power."
The times they ain't a-changin'. The
passionate activists from the Age of Aquarius have grown up to be the new Silent
Majority.
FIVE
STAR PIECE: A New Movement for
Peace, Marianne
Williamson -- April 7, 2002
Suzanne's comments:
This is a teaching speech,
giving us new ways to hold the stalemates of our day. It fits well with Maureen
Dowd's piece, providing some interesting speculations about how the flower
children "turned into the same selfish people we thought we were against."
Marianne takes us way out -- or way in -- to where we are solving the problems
from a different level of consciousness that the one in which they were created
(her homage and mine to Einstein here). "I am of a generation, which thought
that we could bring peace to the world, and we didn't think it mattered if we
ourselves were angry. What we learned is that an angry generation cannot bring
peace."
Other quotes drawn from the
column:
We know
that health is more than the absence of sickness. Health is a positive state
that we proactively cultivate. You don't just wait until you get sick, you
cultivate health. Sickness is the absence of health; health is not the absence
of sickness.
And so it is with war, and conflict in the world as well.
It's not like, 'well if we don't have a war, we're at peace'. In fact, Martin
Luther King Junior used to say that there are two kinds of peace. There's
negative peace, and there is positive peace. Negative peace is where there is no
outright war, but there is underlying tension and anxiety. Positive peace is the
presence of justice and brotherhood. So while many people would say that as they
look at it, there was peace before September 11, many of us would say, 'that
depended on what neighborhood you lived in'...
We cannot take a quantum
leap forward in our circumstances unless we take a quantum leap forward in our
thinking, and I am here today for the same reason that you are, because one of
our most powerful tools for change in consciousness is conversation.
...for those of us who are interested in the non-violent politics of Dr.
King and Gandhi, one of the lines from Martin Luther King, which I find
fascinating is, he said, 'You have no morally persuasive power with people who
can feel your underlying contempt'. You have no morally persuasive power with
people who can feel your underlying contempt. So that takes us full circle back
to the principle that self-purification must precede direct political
action.
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