Bring Back Bob Hope!

It's been a looooong time since I watched the Oscars (2007, in fact, when Ellen DeGeneres was host). It took what seemed like several hours of watching to even get into the spirit--which seemed largely missing. And then they played the video of Bob Hope welcoming the audience to the Academy Awards "or, as it's known in my house, Passover." You had to have been there.

I kind of liked James Franco and Anne Hathaway. They were cute together. What I didn't like was the Red Carpet stuff...gah. It was so BANAL....there, that's a good word.

For Best Picture, "The King's Speech" was the safe choice. "Black Swan" was a much more significant film, and "True Grit" was simply wonderful. (And I'm sorry they gave the supporting actress Oscar to that loudmouth instead of to the girl from "True Grit.") I'm sorry, too, I haven't seen "Toy Story 3" or the one that won so many Oscars, "Inception."

Still, it was fun by the time it was over. It usually is, despite all the nitpicking gripes about hosts and winners. After all, it IS the Oscars!!

Happy Presidents Day, Muthas.....

Echidne saved this unhappy tiding out of the obscurity known as the Noncoverage of Important Things by the media: [occasional instances of bolding by XE as the seizures strike]

Monday, February 21, 2011
Meanwhile, in Frederick County, Maryland, Mothers Should Not Work For Money


The Board of County Commissioners in Frederick County, Maryland, has voted to cut the Head Start program by fifty percent. The Head Start program is:

...a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provides comprehensive education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and their families.

Two County Commissioners explain why this cut is perfectly fine:

County Commissioner Paul Smith said, ‘As many of you know, I had a lot of kids and my wife stayed home at a significant sacrifice in those early years, because she knew she had to be with those kids. I know everybody isn't able to survive doing that, but clearly if we can strengthen marriage, we can decrease the number of children we have to reach.'

Commissioner Kirby Delauter added, according to the newspaper, 'My wife is college educated and could go out and get a very good job. She gave that up for 18 years, so she could stay home with our kids and we gave up a lot to do that. I agree with commissioner smith. The marriage thing is very important.’

When the predictable reactions came in (including a vigil by women of Frederick County), Commissioner Smith clarified his stance:

"I think the ideal situation is for parents to take care of their own children," Smith told The Baltimore Sun. "The mother is the one to be the best situated to take care of small children. I believe that."

Note that neither Commissioner Smith nor Commissioner Delauter has taken care of his own kids.

But despite that, the two gentlemen hold firm opinions about the proper role of women as well as about who it is who should ultimately bear the financial burdens for child-rearing: Women. Because it is the women who stay at home for several years this way who are left with lower retirement income. It is also these same women who are especially vulnerable in the case of a divorce. I'm willing to bet quite a lot that neither Mr. Smith nor Mr. Delauter finds any of that problematic.

Then how about that classism? Do you know how poor a family must be to qualify for Head Start in Frederick County, Maryland? How many poor families can afford for one parent to stay at home? And what about the goals of the Head Start program? It's not really intended as just a daycare program, you know.

Were these two men born this asinine or did they have to work at it? Not that I really care.
----
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Comments (8)

Bloggers, Take Note: The Pen Is LOTS Mightier Than....

...The Keyboard when it comes to MEMORY.

Here's proof:

Pen Mightier Than Keyboard for Making Imprint on Brain
The act of handwriting activates brain regions that help boost recall, researchers find
URL of this page: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_108033.html (*this news item will not be available after 04/24/2011)

By Alan Mozes
Monday, January 24, 2011 HealthDay Logo
HealthDay news image

Related MedlinePlus Page

* Memory

MONDAY, Jan. 24 (HealthDay News) -- As keyboards increasingly replace pens, new research cautions that the switch may come with an unforeseen price: the loss of critical brain activity central to learning that is uniquely tied to the old-fashioned act of handwriting.

The concern stems from the results of a number of experiments recently reviewed by a pair of researchers in France and Norway, who concluded that writing by hand is actually a very different sensory experience than typing on a keyboard, with each activating distinctly different parts of the brain.

"Our bodies are designed to interact with the world which surrounds us," co-author associate professor Anne Mangen from the University of Stavangers Reading Centre in Stavanger, Norway, said in a university news release. "We are living creatures, geared toward using physical objects -- be it a book, a keyboard or a pen -- to perform certain tasks."

This is evidenced, she said, in tests that reveal that the act of handwriting -- literally the feeling of touching a pen to paper -- appears to imprint a "motor memory" in the sensorimotor region of the brain.

In turn, this process promotes the visual recognition of letters and words, suggesting that the two seemingly separate acts of reading and writing are, in fact, linked, Mangen explained.

Click link at the beginning of this excerpt to read the entire article.

XE Gets E-mail....

This flew into my inbox yesterday from Judith....a revered Native American poet and activist:

You cannot make the rich or the government do the decent thing.
Taxes in this country are levied on the powerless and waived for those who benefit the most and who should be shouldering the burden. Taxes could go a long way to minimize disparity--but that's not how it works here. Instead, taxes are a wedge forced on the working and middle classes. [It] Causes class hatred against those of us who need help. [I] Can't figure why people can't identify where the problem really is and who has all the wealth and all the breaks. There are numerous ways to start straightening out this mess. Bring the troops home and end the war in Iraq. Untold money is being given to contractors who have robbed our treasury from the start. Make the banks release the money to those who qualify instead of sitting on their assets. They are keeping people from buying homes, and starting businesses. Someone needs the guts to do the hard work and forget about what will happen in the next election. Winston Churchill...should have defined what he meant when he said you can't tax a nation into prosperity. You can if the right people are the ones taxed. You can't give the rich even more money and believe they will use it for the good of others. That's a fool's dream. You don't give money to auto makers and banks without a way of making them adhere to doing the right thing or facing a stiff penalty. If you give them a blank check they will indeed spend it, and the one doing this has only himself to blame. We are in serious trouble, and trusting those in power with out accountability is a fools game. We need to demand more from the ones who got us into this mess. Bush is out of office, and new and worse problems are occuring. Everyone needs to figure out for themself where the blame lies and fight to right the wrongs. Time is running out.

Thanks, Judith. I especially like "You can't give the rich even more money and believe they will use it for the good of others. That's a fool's dream."

Office Notes

Things have been pretty quiet around the XE office this week. Client A's M-I-L has been very sick, and Client A has been taking care of her. Maximum points, Client A!! And it's OK if your project is late arriving here. XE can work all night, no problem.

The Steering Committee met this afternoon and narrowly avoided driving themselves into the ditch for yet another week! All of this was accomplished on Moroccan Mint Tea and not the usual Boilermakers.

Joanne of Fellowship reports she hates everybody. Especially the rest of the Fellowship team. What to do? They all suck. Maybe they'll quit.

XE took a very enjoyable tour of Monkey Towers in Montreal two days ago.

XE also managed a weekend in Chicago at the adorable home of her oldest grandson's M-I-L, who is une femme formidable! XE especially loves the color scheme in the adorable home--very especially the orange kitchen!!

And the bunny tracks in the snow on the deck (as seen through the screen door, which was frozen shut)!!

No school closings here today; it was "HOT" and "LIKE SPRING" and other terms of winter-driven desperation. The cold and possibly the snow will be back, possums. Not to worry.

Family

When I was growing up, I believed I lived far, far away from a nearby mob of relatives such as my playmates enjoyed (endured?) on Thanksgiving and Christmas and other holidays.  Family picnics? We had ONE family picnic in the years before I left home after high school graduation. I took photos of it myself with my new camera--an eighth grade graduation gift.

Present at the picnic table were Mom and Dad, my brother Paul and his wife, Gertrude, and their three small children, Susan, Cindy, and Mark (Mary, Paula, Lisa, and Tom had not yet arrived), and me. We feasted on Mom's delicious fried chicken and potato salad, and possibly watermelon--which we had packed into our 1936 Plymouth for the drive from Fargo to Wahpeton. My brother & his family recently had moved to Wahpeton. Their new home was next to the railroad tracks in a house that had a rather biggish hole in one corner of the living room floor when they first moved in. 

After we ate, the kids played on the swings in Chahinkapa Park, and we all walked through the nearby zoo, which had a bear and some chickens, and I don't know what else. Probably nothing.  It was early days, as my late mother-in-law used to say.  Chahinkapa Park now has a Rose Chapel for weddings, and Paul has retired after a long, successful career with the telephone company.  In those days, however, his job title was "cable splicer's assistant"--whose main responsibility was to stand near the bottom of the telephone pole and toss pliers and other parts up to the cable splicer working on the wires at the top of the pole.

Unknown to me at the time, was that, besides my Uncle Henry's family, 2.5 hours away, we had scads of relatives--Uncle Joe, Aunt Frances, Aunt Anna, Uncle Tony and their large families--within half a day's drive of Wahpeton.  WW2 was always the reason for our nontravel back then, and that was that. But when I was a kid, I didn't know all of these people lived so close by.

This morning, my niece Susan sent me a copy of my great-grandmother's obituary, and I learned, to my complete surprise, that my dad's father had TWELVE siblings, and not the half-dozen I knew about.  I never met any of them, including my Grandpa, who died right after WW2.

I'm still digesting the news. Not that it matters, I guess.  I was visiting Penny, a lovely woman and my oldest grandson's mother-in-law, in Chicago this past weekend, and she was talking about feeling one of her flaws is not being "social." I laughed and said, "After nearly 50 years of being deaf, I have to be reminded to call my family." Compared with me, she's Perle Mesta. 

We Get E-mail....

The old grade school connection lives and flourishes! I got this priceless e-mail today from Jimmy, who made every girl's heart flutter in 5th grade....

-In today's NY Times, Paul Krugman told a story about what happened in a U S House hearing on Wed., led by congressman Paul Ryan. (R) WI:

excerpt:

But Mr. Ryan is sure that the dollar is being debased and won’t take no for an answer. In an attempt to create a gotcha moment, he waved a copy of a newspaper bearing the headline “Inflation Worries Spread” at the Fed chairman. But the gotcha actually went the other way. As Mr. Bernanke immediately pointed out, the article was about inflation in China and other emerging markets, not in the United States. And the Fed chairman declared, correctly, that “inflation made here in the U.S. is very, very low.”

source:

Abraham Lincoln, Inflationist - NYTimes.com

-------------------------

It reminded me of some Senate hearings years and years ago, led by a Senator from WI, Joe McCarthy. (Joe sponsored my room mate, so I watched him carefully).

My job as a Senate Page that day was to "man" the door, and keep out the riffraff. I created quite a stir at this first day of the hearings, by refusing to let in an olive-skinned, sleazeball-looking young guy, who turned out to be Roy Cohn. (He was finally let in by "higher authority", and identified as a McCarthy aide)

But I still remember old Joe waving "a list of 130 members of the Communist Party", which of course, turned out to be bogus.

And yes, I was right about Roy Cohn--not because of his olive skin, but because you can dress up a sleazeball, and he's still a sleazeball. Us North Dakota boys knew those things, even as a teenager in the 1950s.

(Jim, I do wonder on which planet Mr. Bernanke's United States with "very, very low" inflation is. It can't be the one where, if he takes himself to the movies, a medium diet drink now is $5! Still, I suppose if you have a big, fat salary, Abe Lincoln has replaced George Washington on the smallest significant bill. It must be the same one on which Congress Critters and Presidents do not eat the same food as everyone else in the country and thus scramble to allow GMO alfalfa and GMO sugar beets with their 400% increase in pesticides.)

But I digress. Leave it to the Repugs to scramble their sources and act like, um, sleazeballs.

My Role Model!!

Take a look at those arms!! Michelle Obama has nothing on this 73-year-old from Baltimore. Now's the time...Gonna get with it.

Tough Love

Mother Nature is a tough old girl. If we want to use and abuse her resources, she's not going to enable our folly. We'll pay for our greed and carelessness. One thing she never does is say, "I told you so." Like all good mothers, she gives us enough rope to hang ourselves. If we want to exterminate homo sapiens on the planet, she'll let us. And the planet will go on without us. The flora and fauna we see around us probably didn't exist in the very beginning. And the way things are going, we won't see them for long, either. Birds are falling from the very sky. Fish are washing up dead on shores everywhere.

I wonder who this Barack Obama is? How could he allow himself to approve the addition of GMO alfalfa and GMO sugar beets? Apparently he--like the other dunderheaded politicians and lobbyists--doesn't believe in science, either. He and they believe only in the bottom line--for the very rich.

Happy Monday.....

Life complicated? Keep on truckin....

Thanks to Life...

I had a great Spanish lesson today...about the three ways to say "I am" in Spanish. On the bus home, I overheard the woman next to me say, "Yo tengo...." That's one of the ways! I didn't catch the rest of her sentence, but it might have been "Yo tengo frio!" "I am COLD"--cuz it was, today. Cold. It is also my father's birthday. He'd be 117! In his honor, here's one of my favorite songs, written and performed by the incomparable Chilean folklorist, Violeta Parra.




Spanish
Gracias A La Vida

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me dio dos luceros, que cuando los abro,
Perfecto distingo lo negro del blanco
Y en el alto cielo su fondo estrellado
Y en las multitudes el hombre que yo amo

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado el oído que en todo su ancho
Graba noche y día, grillos y canarios,
Martillos, turbinas, ladridos, chubascos,
Y la voz tan tierna de mi bien amado

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado el sonido y el abecedario;
Con el las palabras que pienso y declaro:
Madre, amigo, hermano, y luz alumbrando
La ruta del alma del que estoy amando

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado la marcha de mis pies cansados;
Con ellos anduve ciudades y charcos,
Playas y desiertos, montañas y llanos,
Y la casa tuya, tu calle y tu patio

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me dio el corazón que agita su marco
Cuando miro el fruto del cerebro humano,
Cuando miro al bueno tan lejos del malo,
Cuando miro al fondo de tus ojos claros

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto
Me ha dado la risa y me ha dado el llanto
Así yo distingo dicha de quebranto,
Los dos materiales que forman mi canto,
Y el canto de ustedes que es mi mismo canto,
Y el canto de todos que es mi propio canto
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto

English
THANKS TO LIFE

THANKS TO LIFE THAT HAS GIVEN ME SO MUCH
IT GAVE ME TWO BRIGHT STARS AND WHEN I OPEN THEN
I DISTINGUISH PERFECTLY THE BLACK FROM THE WHITE
AND IN the high sky its starred bottom
AND INT THE CROWD THE MAN I LOVE

THANKS TO LIFE THAT HAS GIVEN ME SO MUCH
IT GAVE ME HEARING IN ALL ITS WIDENESS
IT RECORDS, NIGHT AND DAY, CRICKETS AND CANARIES,
HAMMERS, TURBINES, BARKS, AND SHOWERS,
AND MY LOVER'S TENDER VOICE

THANKS TO LIFE THAT HAS GIVEN ME SO MUCH
IT GAVE ME THE SOUND AND THE ALPHABET
WITH IT WORDS I'M THINKING AND DECLARING
MOTHER, FRIEND, BROTHER AND A LIGHT ILLUMINATING
THE WAY TO THE SOUL OF MY LOVER

THANKS TO THE LIFE THAT HAS ME SO MUCH
IT HAS GIVEN ME THE STRENGTH TO MY TIRED FEET
WITH THEM I WALKED CITIES AND PUDDLES
BEACHES AND DESSERTS, MOUNTAINS AND PLANES
AND YOUR HOUSE, YOUR STREET, AND YOUR COURTYARD

THANKS TO LIFE THAT HAS GIVEN ME SO MUCH
I GAVE MY BEATING HEART
WHEN I LOOK THE FRUIT OF THE HUMAN BRAIN
WHEN I LOOK THE GOOD SO FAR FROM THE BAD
WHEN I LOOK INSIDE YOUR CLEAR EYES

THANKS TO LIFE THAT HAS GIVEN ME SO MUCH
IT GAVE LAUGHTER AND CRYING
SO I CAN DISTINGUISH HAPPINESS FROM SADNESS
BOTH MATERIALS THAT FORM MY SONG
AND YOUR SONG THAT IS MINE, TOO
AND THE SONG OF ALL WHICH IS MY OWN SONG
THANKS TO LIFE THAT HAS GIVEN ME SO MUCH

And Another Point.....

Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic yesterday wrote about the Neocons' reaction to the events in Egypt: [emphasis mine]

The Neocons Split with Israel Over Egypt
Feb 2 2011, 8:37 AM ET By Jeffrey Goldberg

Well, this is interesting. The neoconservative (or liberal interventionist) wing of American Jewish political thought (not that all neocons are Jewish, God forbid anyone should think that!) is cheering on the revolution in Egypt, while the Israeli government, and much of Israel's pundit class, is seeing the apocalypse in Mubarak's apparent downfall. Writing in The Times today, Yossi Klein Halevi captures the despairing mood of the Israeli policy elite:

"(T)he grim assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power. Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.

Either result would be the end of Israel's most important relationship in the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty if it comes into power. Given the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas's control of Gaza and the unraveling of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, an Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country surrounded by Iran's allies or proxies.

But the neoconservatives, who have made democracy promotion in the Middle East an overarching goal, are scratching their heads at what they see as Israeli shortsightedness. I asked Elliott Abrams, formerly of the Bush Administration National Security Council, and now at the Council on Foreign Relations, what he makes of the Israeli longing for Mubarak. He was scathing in his response:

The Israelis first of all do not believe in the universality of democracy. They believe what many American "experts" did in, say, 1950--democracy was fine for us and Western Europe, but not for Latins (too much Catholic culture) and Asians (too much Confucianism). They believe Arab culture does not permit democracy.

They see a danger in Mubarak's fall, and they are right: we do not know who will take over now or in a year or two from now. But this is at bottom a crazy reaction. What they are afraid of is the Muslim Brotherhood, right? Mubarak has ruled for THIRTY YEARS and leaves us a Brotherhood that is that powerful? Isn't that all the proof we need that dictatorship is not the way to fight the Brotherhood? He crushed the moderate and centrist groups and left the Brothers with an open field. He is to blame for the Brothers' popularity and strength right now. The sooner he goes the better.

It's worth remembering that, despite the various Walt and Mearsheimer-style conspiracy theories about Israeli influence on American politics, the Israelis themselves were noticeably unenthusiastic about another neoconservative notion, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In other words, the gap between Israel and the neocons that has widened over Egypt is not, in fact, new.

Rabbi Michael Learner Writes on Egypt

As many times as I become totally fed up with Israel's intransigence regarding the Palestinian people, I always am greatly heartened when the brilliant Rabbi Michael Lerner speaks--about anything. The following article from Tikkun is his eloquent commentary on Egypt's uprising. I, too, support the brave, wonderful Egyptian people we've witnessed over the past week making their voices heard for freedom and justice. Many here have said that President Obama won't call decisively for Mubarak to step down because Israel doesn't want it. We need to know that not all American Jews support all of Israel's policies.

Many Jews from around the world support Egyptian self-determination because of Judaism's own historic past with Egypt. So while the Jewish establishment expresses its concerns, most younger Jews rejoice at the flourishing of freedom.

Jewish prayers for Egypt's uprising
Rabbi Michael Lerner

Jews recount at Passover their own history with the Pharaoh of Egypt - so sympathies to the current Egyptian struggle run deep

Ever since the victory over the dictator of Tunisia and the subsequent uprising in Egypt, my email has been flooded with messages from Jews around the world hoping and praying for the victory of the Egyptian people over their cruel Mubarak regime. True, right-wing Jews who control the major Jewish organizations in the US (which operate on the principle of one dollar one vote, not one person one vote) and the right wing government of Israel have confined their reactions to "Is is good for the Jew?", many other Jews react differently--realizing that it is good for the world, and so respond to a fundamental point made by Tikkun: what is good for the world is good for the Jews.

Though a small segment of Jews have responded to right-wing voices from Israel that lament the change and fear that a democratic government would bring to power fundamentalist extremists who wish to destroy Israel and who would abrogate the hard-earned treaty that has kept the peace between Egypt and Israel for the last 30 years, the majority of Jews are more excited and hopeful than worried.

Of course, the worriers have a point. Israel has allied itself with repressive regimes in Egypt and used that alliance to ensure that the borders with Gaza would remain closed while Israel attempted to economically deprive the Hamas regime there by denying needed food supplies and equipment to rebuild after Israel's devastating attack in December 2008 and January 2009. If the Egyptian people take over, they are far more likely to side with Hamas than with the Israeli blockade of Gaza. But the fundamentalists in Egypt are Sunni, unlike the Shi'ite fundamentalists in Iran, and many have publicly stated that they would not want war with Israel nor do they seek to impose Sharia law in the way it is imposed in Afghanistan or Iran, but rather they would accept a mixed society. Unlike the Shi'ites, the Sunni do not believe as a matter of doctrine that the society must be ruled by clergy. Of course, within the ranks of fundamentalists there will be an inevitable struggle between those who are more anti-Israel and anti-West and those who are more open to Israel and the West. At the current moment the Muslim Brotherhood is led by the more moderate elements. Will these moderates win out? Well what we do during the transition, both as Americans and as Jews, and what Israel does, could have an impact on the outcome. If we are perceived as continuing to support the oppressive regime of the past that will tend to help the most reactionary elements, and if we are perceived as trying to help the Egyptian people achieve genuine freedom and democracy, that is likely to help the most moderate elements.

It is impossible for most Jews to forget our heritage as victims of another Egyptian tyrant - the Pharaoh whose reliance on brute force was overthrown when the Israelite slaves managed to escape from Egypt some 3,000 years ago. That story of freedom retold each year at our Passover "Seder" celebration, and read in synagogues in the past month, has often predisposed the majority of Jews to side with those struggling for freedom around the world (except for the most right-wing Jews who have placed Jewish survival as their sole concern and do not understand that our well being depends on the well being of everyone else on the planet, because we are all one).

To watch hundreds of thousands of Egyptians able to throw off the chains of oppression and the legacy of a totalitarian regime that consistently jailed, tortured or murdered its opponents so overtly that most people were cowed into silence, is to remember that the spark of God continues to flourish no matter how long oppressive regimes manage to keep themselves in power, and that ultimately the yearning for freedom and democracy cannot be totally stamped out no matter how cruel and sophisticated the elites of wealth, power and military might appear to be.

Many Jews have warned Israel that it is a mistake to ally with these kinds of regimes, just as we've warned the US to learn the lesson from its failed alliance with the Shah of Iran. We've urged Israel to free the Palestinian people by ending the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. Israel's long-term security will not be secured through military or economic domination, but only by acting in a generous and caring way toward the Palestinian people first, and then toward all of its Arab neighbours.

Similarly, America's homeland security will best be achieved through a strategy of generosity and caring, manifested through a new Global Marshall Plan such as has been introduced into the House of Representatives by Congressman Keith Ellison.

In normal times, when the forces of repression seem to be winning, this kind of thinking is dismissed as "utopian" by the "realists" who shape public political discourse. But when events like the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt occur, for a moment the politicians and media are stunned enough to allow a different kind of thinking to emerge, the kind of thinking that acknowledged that underneath all the "business as usual" behaviour of the world's peoples, the yearning for a world based on solidarity, caring for each other, freedom, self-determination, justice, non-violence and yes, even love and generosity, remains a potent and unquenchable thirst that may be temporarily repressed but never fully extinguished.

It is this recognition that leads many Jews to join with the rest of the world's peoples in celebrating the uprising, in praying that it does not become manipulated by the old regime into paths that too quickly divert the hopes for a brand new kind of order into politics and economics as usual, or into extremist attempts to switch the anger from domestic elites who have been the source of Egyptian oppression onto Jews or Israel which have not been responsible for the suffering of the Egyptian people.

We hope that Egyptians will hear the news that they have strong support from many in the Jewish world. We are not waffling like Obama - we want the overthrow of Mubarak, the freeing of all political prisoners, the redistribution of wealth in a fair way, trials for those who perpetrated torture and other forms of injustice, and the democratisation of all aspects of Egyptian life.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun, chair of the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in Berkeley, California. You can read more about the Global Marshall Plan here. You can contact the author directly: RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org. Please register for Tikkun Magazine's 25th Anniversary celebration: info at www.tikkun.org/celebrate